


Life Without The Sunlight

by TOWRTA



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fantasy, Gen, Neil Gaiman Inspired, Pre-relationship (she's fifteen), Sarah Williams Has No Idea What She's In For, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-10-06 16:11:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 30,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17348384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TOWRTA/pseuds/TOWRTA
Summary: "Don't go that way!" said the worm."Why not?" asked Sarah."That way leads straight to that there castle, that's why.""Does it really?"And so Sarah goes left instead of right, not realising that a wrong turn in a labyrinth can take you a long way from where you meant to go.Without meaning to, Sarah journeys beyond the borders of the Labyrinth into a land of shadows, where she discovers her own magic and the redemption of a Goblin King.





	1. Be Careful What You Wish For

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah goes in another direction and Jareth's good mood gets ruined.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter One_

* * *

"Don't go that way!"

"What?"

"Never go that way."

"Oh, thanks!" I started right, as directed, then paused. This Labyrinth had already proved to not be what it seemed. Could the same be said of the creatures? I took a step back and said, "Why not?" to the worm.

The worm clicked its tongue. "That way leads straight to that there castle, that's why. You don't want to be going that way."

"Does it really?" I looked down the left corridor, leading seemingly to nowhere except more walls and broken logs and a far, far horizon of orange sky. Empty and decrepit. I wondered what the castle looked like.

"'Course it does. Why would I lie?" said the worm. "Now come on. The missus will have the kettle going."

"No, no thank you." That Goblin King was full of hogwash. This was going to be easy as pie!

The worm shook its head. "Why'd you be wanting to go to the castle anyhow?" Its high-pitched, scratchy voice grated on my nerves.

"The King has my little brother. I need to get him back."

"So you  _are_  one of them, are you?"

"Them?" I looked at the worm then, at its fluffy eyebrows and red scarf and giant eyes. Its kind manner made up for the patent hideousness. "What do you mean them?"

"Them speakers that be looking for their siblings, of course. Did you think you're the only one?"

"I –" I didn't know what I thought. There was a part of me that thought this all a dream, and hoped it was. I couldn't believe my fantasy realms of magic and wonder would steal my baby brother from me. "Have you met the others before?"

"I've met a few."

"And they were all looking for the goblin castle?"

"Right you are."

"Then why would you send me the away from the castle if you guessed I wanted to go that way too?"

"Because the King spots anyone who goes that way," he said, in a  _no duh_ tone of voice. I found it rather offensive.

Bristling, I demanded, "How? How can he spot them? What does he do to them?"

"He's got his magic crystals, see. He can see anything he wants through those if he knows what he's looking for." Impossibly, the worm's eyes widened further. "In fact, he's probably listening to us right now," it said, horrified, and it started hurrying, inch by inch, to a steaming crack in the wall. "King Jareth won't be pleased by me talking to you, oh no he won't. Sorry, Miss, the missus is waiting."

"Wait!" I cried. "Tell me what he does to them, please."

At the threshold of his home, the worm glanced about and whispered, "If you get too close to the castle too quickly, he throws you into somewhere nasty lickety split. Good luck to you, Miss." And the worm darted inside.

"Thanks a bunch." I sighed. "Great. Not only is he a kidnapper, but he's a stalker. Well, you don't scare me!" I shouted to the heavens. "You hear? You don't scare me!" I took the left path towards the goblin castle.

After a few steps, the worm's words got to me. I started repeating under my breath, "He can't see me, no one can see me, I won't be caught, he can't see me, no one can, I won't be caught." Over and over, a desperate mantra. I needed Toby and I needed to get out of here and I did not, by any means, want to find out where somewhere nasty was.

"He can't see me. I'm unseen. Oh, I wish I could be invisible."

* * *

Jareth finished the song with the goblins and revelled in their laughter, their glee, their simple joy. In his own way he loved them as best he could, this collection of mottled and pocked creatures, some of which had been toddlers from Above. He entertained them with music and magic every day. He kept their minds off their plight until they'd become too stupid to remember what was wrong with them in the first place. By now, centuries into his rule, they had about as much intelligence as the chickens they were so fond.

They bounced about the crumbling throne room and didn't notice that the windows had once been glazed and the stones had been clean of feathers and dirt. They were oblivious and he kept them that way. Only he, the Goblin King, needed to understand the nature of their isolated Labyrinth.

What he didn't like was the fact that a little miss Sarah Williams was not anywhere to be found in the run-down city or the near-empty castle. Or the Labyrinth. Nowhere. He stared at the crystal ball and all vestiges of good humour disappeared. He was the Goblin King who wielded power beyond imagination and controlled with mischief and might. He could not be beaten. He could not be evaded.

And yet some girl had done just that.

"Where ever could she be?" he mused to her half-brother, hiding the simmering frustration. Her brother burbled and snuggled in Jareth's arms, tired from the trauma of the last few hours. Jareth let him sleep and tried not to think about the fate his sister might be binding him to.

The sister. That damned girl with the black hair and green eyes and the awestruck, dreamy expression in her round face. She was prettier than many of the petulant children who had run his Labyrinth before, and though she seemed to live her days with her head in the clouds, he sensed steel within. After all, she had accepted the challenge of the Labyrinth and risk a king's wrath. A girl to be watched. The Speakers were all like that. You needed a certain something to toil with the Labyrinth, after all.

But none of them –  _none of them_ – had ever disappeared.

"Hoggle!" Jareth roared, upsetting Toby. A clank echoed through the chamber and Jareth spared a glance from shushing the baby to see Hoggle, ugly, pockmarked thing, bewildered before the throne.

"O-oh!" Hoggle exclaimed, voice wavering. "Your Majesty." He ducked a bow and the surrounding goblins sniggered. Hoggle glared back.

"Where is the girl, Hogtie?" Jareth demanded.

"The girl, your Majesty? What girl?" Jareth's glare said all it needed to. Hoggle's eyes widened, "Oh, that girl! She went into the Labyrinth."

"And you let her in," said the King.

Hoggle twisted his puckered lips. "It's my job to give the Speakers entrance."

"That it is," Jareth allowed. "What  _isn't_ your job is to show them how to disappear!" Jareth's rage cracked across the room and silence fell. Setting Toby to sleep in a mound of chicken feathers, Jareth stalked over to Hoggle.

He reared, ready to snap again, when Hoggle stuttered, "But your Majesty, how could she disappear?"

Face to face, the dwarf and his monarch pondered this question. And realised. And Jareth's pale face paled further.

"She did it," he whispered. "She disappeared herself."

_Oh, Sarah, do you know what you have done?_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: Short but sweet, that's the mantra of this story - it's only about 31k words in all. If you stick around week by week, it'll all be up soon enough (I encourage you to; it gets quite . . . fantastic by the end). In this version, the Labyrinth isn't a conjuring of Sarah's imagination, and thus the world I get to play in grows ever larger, and Jareth's character starts layering itself bit by bit beyond being a fifteen-year-old's dream dude. We end up with a story the same length as Coraline and in keeping with that sort of dark and pretty fantasy. Needless to say, I loved writing this.
> 
> Updates on Tuesdays and Saturdays (New Zealand time). Hope to see you there!
> 
> God Bless!


	2. Welcome to the Dark Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah learns that wishes come true in weird ways and Jareth plays at saving the day.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Two_

* * *

 

Ten minutes into my journey and I was more anxious than when I'd started it.  _Magic crystals. See anything he wants. Nasty place._ Damn, this was more of a nightmare than a dream, wasn't it?

No matter, I told myself. No matter whatsoever. Keep putting one foot in front of the other and I'd get there eventually. It was how Mom became famous, after all. She kept at it until she was at the top, no matter what stood in her way.

No matter who stood in her way.

I shook off the thought, blinked, and a door appeared in the wall that had most definitely not been there before. Amongst the glittering bricks, it was half my height and made of one stone slab. Crouching, I shoved. It crashed down like a drawbridge.

Ooh, hopefully no one heard that.

"I am unseen," I whispered. "He can't see me. No one can catch me." On the other side of the door had to be the castle. Where else in this place would you find a vaulted hall where pillars sprouted from the ceiling and plunged into a granite floor? Huge windows occupied the arches set into the walls, letting in hazy light. Dust swirled in air currents, flickering in and out of the beams, spinning in my breath and alighting on my limbs. I pressed my shirt cuff to my mouth and nose to keep from coughing. The space was huge, but the dust and the dirt-darkened stone was oppressive. This was an ominous, unhappy place. How could a king like Jareth live here?

Three steps across the threshold and I felt like I was being watched. There, in the dimness of the ceiling, something waited. Eyes glinted, on the cusp of visible. Slithering on the edge of hearing. The movement was felt more than seen, a sensation in my skin rather than reality. Disturbed, I hastened through the haze and dark towards the open door at the end of the hall.

Two feet from the door, I saw the corridor beyond and the open entrance way into what looked like a throne room. There was Toby, sleeping next to the throne, and there was Jareth, scowling into a crystal ball, and there was Hoggle. I reached out a hand in delight . . .

Only for the floor to open under my feet. I slammed, chest-first, into the hard edge of granite. I scrabbled, gasping, "No! No, no, no!" but there could be no handhold in the dust, and I screamed, falling, falling, into darkness, wind rushing about me, the square of light growing smaller by the second as I was swallowed in eternity.

* * *

"Oof!" I hit the ground hard, not at all like Alice in Wonderland. I lay there panting. My entire torso felt as though it had been punched by a giant.

With a groan, I pushed myself up and looked around and saw . . .

Nothing.

I blinked, I fluttered my eyelashes against my palm, I waved my hand about in the air.

Nothing.

There was no light. There was my ragged breathing and the shifting of stones under my shins and that was all. "Hey!" I shouted. "Hey! Let me out of here! Where am I?" The sound was swallowed up almost before it left my mouth.

In the back of my mind the clock ticked down. How long had it been? Two hours? More? Toby didn't look in pain or in danger in the throne room so there was one good thing. But that wouldn't matter in a few hours if he got turned into a goblin.

I stumbled to my feet and, arms outstretched, made my way across the floor. My fingers touched coldness. I flinched and reached out again to brush more stone. Bumpy, uneven, catching. Trailing my hand along, I mapped the entire chamber and found no openings. It was only a few inches taller than I was and yet I could not find the hole that I must have fallen through.

"It's a dream," I said to break the silence. Blood, normally unheard as it went about its business in keeping me alive, suddenly pulsed in my ears and I could feel the fist-sized lump of muscle in my chest beating. "It's a dream or it's a trick and soon Jareth will appear and get me out. He can see me down here. He won't let me die. Surely not. Surely . . . Oh  _gosh_ what if he does?"

At fifteen, I was faced with my own mortality. My mind's love for stories spun out a gruesome imagining of captivity here in this forsaken hole; having to relieve myself and hope not to step in it later. The smell. The disgust at being unwashed. The encroaching hunger. The thirst. The madness as my mind started playing tricks on me and the weakness that would chain me to the ground, incapable of escape even if I wanted to. The back of my head would be stabbed with stones because I had no strength to lift it.

I felt the throbbing anger at Jareth for leaving me here to die and the despair over Toby and the sorrow for Dad and Karen and Mom. They would never know what happened and would search the neighbourhood, file missing persons reports, forever ask the question  _what happened to our children?_

So struck by the imaginings, I crumpled to the floor, put my head in my hands, and tried not to shake.

"Jareth," I whispered. "Jareth, please, get me out of here." The Goblin King was my only hope. I repeated the plea, over and over again, like the prayer of invisibility. It filled my ears and mind.

I finally registered I wasn't alone.

My head snapped up. Sn enormous black cat sat on its haunches, lit by a light that touched nothing else, and cocked its head. The long tail flicked back and forth. A large white spot discoloured the breast of its lush coat.

I sat quite still. The cat was as large as Merlin and rippled with sinewy muscle. Its green eyes gleamed in animal curiosity. This was no housetrained pet.

"How interesting," it purred. My heart lodged in my throat and I could push no words past it. The cat's eyes dilated into black portals. "We've never had a Speaker before."

"A what?" I managed to choke out.

The cat's tail flicked through the black air. "You're a shadow walker now. Unseen by all except those who have also hidden themselves." The cat bared its teeth and sauntered closer. I shrunk into myself and shuddered as its tail stroked my cheek.

"Stop it." I pulled my knees to my chest and tried not to shiver.

The tail tickled my nose and I batted it away. The cat rumbled, deep in its chest, halfway between a purr and a growl and somewhere nearer a laugh. "A baby shadow walker. Come, baby, and I will show you the paths."

"Don't call me that. I am not a baby and I have to find my brother. Do you know where he is?"

The cat's head tilted the other way. Its left ear twitched. "Why would I know that?"

"The Goblin King stole him. I want him back."

In a wave of muscle from its head to its tail, it shrugged. "I do not concern myself with the sun striders."

"Who . . . visible people? Like humans?"

"Humans, cats, kings. Those that dwell in the sunlight and sleep when darkness comes. What use do I have mingling with the other half?" In an undulating circle, it glided around me, tail trailing over my shoulders. The tail dived under my hair to stroke the back of my neck.

"Stop!"

It laughed again and suddenly its green eyes and flashing teeth loomed inches from mine. My breath caught. "Come, come, baby walker," it hissed. "Follow me. I will show you the ways of the shadows."

"I need to find my brother," I begged. "I only have a few hours."

"It's a long road to escape the shadows."

"Jareth will come for me."

"No sun strider will find you. You must join us or die here."

"He's the Goblin King!" I cried. "He's magic! He can find me!"

The cat stretched, its claws extending. Wicked talons capable of rending flesh. The sharpness cut off a piece of my indignation. "Did you, or did you not, wish to be unseen?" it asked.

"I . . . I didn't mean it."

"Did you not?"

"Well . . ."

It nodded, once. "Come. Join us. Otherwise stay and die. It's all the same to me."

"Why did you come then?"

The cat stood and turned and started to disappear from view. I scrabbled to my feet and gave chase. It purred-growled when I caught up and said, "Curiosity, of course."

* * *

Jareth swept along the ancient corridors of his castle. He heard his memories, the ghosts of glasses clinking and music playing and chattering Undergrounders, from every empty room and chamber and hall he passed. It took little effort to ignore them. Such phantasms had lost their fright after many long years of blocking them out.

The living, breathing creatures he came across were as dull and drab as their surroundings, not glittering like the ones he remembered from his father's time. These subjects, in a rare show of mind, scurried out of his way and peered after the black, flapping coat as it swished around the next corner. They gazed at each other. A new emotion surprised them. Fear.

The Goblin King was on the warpath. One of his Speakers, a mere human, had managed to vanish herself, thus getting banished to the world of shadows and spectres. It was almost unthinkable.

Unknown to any creature in the Aboveground, and known to all Under, was that as well as the physical places of Above and Under, there existed the shadow realm. All creatures Under ran the risk of joining its walkers, should they pray for vanishment. For most Undergrounders, they wouldn't even dare. The shadow realm had little allure. In the Underground, immortality was assured, but in the shadows, death was a terrifying possibility as it had never been before. Your lifespan was only as long as it took for the next of your kind to get stuck there.

He had not heard of a mortal doing so. Sarah Williams had, and that meant she was on a ticking clock until the next human managed it.

 _Humans,_ he thought in disgust.  _They just can't help themselves, can they?_

Jareth threw a crystal at the wall and a section of it warped, twisting in on itself, and became a wavering grey haze of whispers. Jareth felt his skin crawl. He'd like nothing more than to close the portal and leave the girl to her doom. For, though Underground monarchs could come and go as they pleased, there was a cost to it. It was the way of the world. He only hoped the cost was to himself and nothing worse.

But it couldn't be helped. It was his duty to rescue his Speaker.

Jareth flicked the hair from his eyes and sauntered through.

He came out into a forest, replete with mossy ground and ancient trees and faint moonlight breaking apart on the canopy to rain to the forest floor. Standard shadow realm fare. There were hundreds of these places and, fate willing, he'd entered the same one as Sarah, or at least one that linked closely to hers.

No sooner had he stepped onto the damp ground did a shape weave between the tree trunks. Hulking, massive, it was the size of a bull. The King waited, arms crossed.

The dog padded over on dinnerplate paws. Two black eyes stared out through shaggy fur. "My Lord," said the dog, bowing its heavy head.

"Glad to have a welcome party," Jareth replied. The baleful glare he got in return made him bite his tongue.

"Why do you visit us?" asked the Cù-Sìth. "I've heard you never stray from your kingdom."

"A human has stumbled in here. She's of no importance except that I get her back." Jareth looked around and saw no sight of any other creature. "Do you have any idea where she might be?"

The beast shook its head, hanks of mossy green fur flapping about. Literally mossy. A Cù-Sìth's coat was made of the stuff. You had to give this to humans – they had great imagination.

"Who would know?" Jareth prodded.

The dog thought. "The cat."

"Where is it?"

"The cockatrice would know."

"Would it, now?"

"The cat torments the cockatrice so the cockatrice watches the cat."

"And how do we find the cockatrice?"

"Fire." At that, the Cù-Sìth turned and headed into the depths of the forest. Its braided tail swung with every step. Jareth followed, heart sinking. Of course they had to find the cockatrice.

Bloody psychotic fire-breathing birds of death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: Here ye are! Thanks to everyone whose followed this, favourited, or reviewed - you guys are the lifeblood of this website. Without you, most of us needy little writers wouldn't even bother. So, thank you!
> 
> See you on Tuesday (or Monday for some people) for chapter three!
> 
> God Bless


	3. Snakes on a (Shadow) Plane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we meet an important character and Sarah hates snakes (for good reason).

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Three_

* * *

"Where are we?" I asked, staring up at the shards of the moon I could glimpse. The sky held no stars or clouds. A disc of moon hung overhead and even that felt wrong, unreal. It seemed like a white paint splodge on a blank canvas because someone decided that total black might be boring. There was no sense of distance or mass.

"The shadow realm."

"Does that mean it's always night here?"

"Indeed." The cat leaped over a protruding tree root that came up to my knees. I circumvented it and hurried to catch up. A few moments into following the cat, the scenery had changed into this dim forest. One breath and the heady scent of earth filled my nose and got stuck there. No breeze had ever touched moved through to cleanse the air or rustle the leaves overhead. Nothing had changed here for as long as the forest had existed, except perhaps the inhabitants.

"How long have you been here?" I asked the cat.

"Ask the moon how long it has hung in the sky."

"That doesn't make any sense!"

The cat purred in amusement. "Sense has very little to do with it."

"What do you even do in here? Are there other cats? What did you mean stay and die back there?" I stared hard at the ground to navigate a root system. When I looked up again, I gasped. The cat was gone.  _No._

"There are none like me," said the cat and I rushed to find it. A glint of brilliant green came into view. There the cat sat in a puddle of false moonlight, licking its paw. "There are none like you either."

"What?"

It rubbed its clean paw over its face. "There is one of each here. One cat. One snake. One griffin. One of you."

"Why?" It didn't appear to be moving anytime soon, so I took a seat on the driest root I could find. The seat of my jeans dampened instantly.

"There is always one," it explained between licks. "When the new one arrives, the first dies. It is the way of the realm."

"That's . . . that's horrible! You're saying if another person wished to be invisible, I would die?"

"Only if they were in the Underground. You humans stay in your surface world where you don't know about your powers of creation. You have no idea what your words are capable of."

"What does  _that_ mean?"

The cat stretched from whiskers to tail and wandered off again. I jogged level with its shoulder and tried to stay there. Something told me this animal would not try hard to find me if I got left behind.

"Words have power and the words of humans are especially potent. All inhabitants of the Underground were spoken into being by your stories, but the Aboveground lacks the magic for anything else. It's because you were in Jareth's Labyrinth that you could make your way here."

"Oh. I guess that makes sense." Its tail smacks me in the nose. "Hey!"

"Sense has no place here," it scolded. "To wish oneself into nothingness is senseless, therefore the realm of nothing has no sense."

 _I'm starting to think the one with no sense is you_ , I thought.

Suddenly, the cat's ears flattened against its skull. It hissed, its hackles rising, tail puffing into a bottlebrush. I looked around and saw trees, trees, and more trees.

"What's wrong?" I whispered.

"Listen," it growled.

I did. I strained my ears and listened past the throbbing blood and found it _._ On the edge of hearing was a familiar slithering. A shiver ran down my spine and I stepped closer to the cat.

"What is it?"

"The snake."

"But . . . but it won't hurt us, right?"

The cat's eyes narrowed to slits. "What gave you that senseless idea?" Its gaze flicked up. "It comes."

The slithering grew louder, and I saw a shadow moving amongst the shadows. It blocked out pieces of moonlight. It twined around the branches and, scales scraping on bark, lowered the front third of itself towards the earth.

If it was a snake, it wasn't any snake I'd ever seen. Below its scales seemed to burn a yellow fire, one that erupted from piercing slit eyes and the gaps between the scales and the meeting of its jaws. Sharp spines protruded along its back. The very end of its tail spasmed and one of the spines went through a branch. Without a sound, the branch was cleaved in two and the cut half plunged to the moss.

Its forked tongue flashed, tasting my fear, which was worse than anything I'd ever experienced. This was my nightmare. One of those subconscious terrors like a fear of earthquakes or volcanoes. Dad always found my dread of snakes hilarious, considering the only snake I'd ever encountered was a one-foot garter snake that, upon seeing me, vanished from its rock, rustling through the tallgrass and was never seen again.

Its glowing yellow eyes levelled with mine. It hung, motionless, waiting for me to act. Its head was bigger than my chest.

"Snake," said the cat in greeting. "We have a new arrival."

"So, I see," said the snake in one long hiss. It opened its mouth, exposing its fangs. There were six of them, small pairs near the centre of its top and bottom jaws, and the poison fangs outside these. They were the length of my forearm and curled down into needle-sharp tips. This close, I could see the holes near the roots of each tooth where the poison would be ejected and coat the fangs and when they stabbed into me the poison would enter my bloodstream and set every artery on fire.

I wanted to faint. Was that an option? Or would I just be eaten faster?

The snake's jaw slammed shut. "Where are you taking her?" it asked.

"I am teaching her to traverse the paths, that is all."

Pure alien hunger stared at me. "She is a Speaker . . . We have never had a Speaker . . . How did she get here?"

"She was in Jareth's kingdom when she made the wish." The cat's ears remained flattened to its skull. The snake's eyes glowed brighter.

I, for myself, had forgotten how to breath.

"Jareth's kingdom . . . The Labyrinth . . . So, I see." It moved closer. No, no,  _no_ , please, get away,  _ew_ , its tongue tasted my cheek. One giant yellow eye hovered an inch from my ear, the rest of it stretching into the shadows overhead where that tail spasmed again, again, slicing at twigs and leaves and branches that fell like confetti.

"Speakers created me . . . You wanted a god, you wanted a devil, I was all that and more . . . I was everything you wanted . . . I was your self-destruction in flesh and yet . . . Your spoken creations banished me here . . . While you crushed our heads underfoot . . ."

I blinked, and it was right in front of me, rearing back, mouth gaping open, "So I will bite off yours!"

"Run!" screamed the cat.

* * *

The dog's ears swivelled to the right and its head followed an instant later. "There."

The shadows where the dog looked were slightly less black than the rest of the forest. After peering for a moment, Jareth caught sight of flames. "I assume," he drawled, "That will be the cockatrice."

"Or the dragon," the dog replied.

_Fantastic._

The dog led Jareth along a path that soon distinguished itself from the rest of the forest. The trees were charred, the roots crumbled to charcoal under their feet, and the moss was nothing more than ash. Jareth dreaded meeting the creature that did this.

The girl better be grateful.

They came across the first spot fire after two minutes of walking. It burned merrily around a tree without being able to reach the canopy. They gave it a wide berth and found the next one in a dozen paces.

"Beware," said the dog. "The cockatrice is stupid and strong."

"I figured out as much for myself, oddly enough," Jareth quipped.

The cockatrice crouched behind another burning tree. Jareth was right; bloody psychotic fire-breathing birds of death indeed. A cockatrice is a three-metre-tall rooster with leathery wings and a proclivity for random arson. At this moment, it was tucked up in a nest of fire, head bowed.

Jareth searched for the beady red eyes said to kill with only a glance and found savage wounds in their place.

"The cat blinded it," the dog explained.

"Then how on earth can it follow the cat?"

The dog thought. "It follows its own fear."

Ah, yes, good old shadow realm logic.

It was getting hot surrounded by fire on all sides and Jareth wanted this over with. He looked around for the cat and saw nothing. He scowled, turned on the dog, opened his mouth and . . .

A distant shout wafted through the trees. " _Run!_ "

The cockatrice jerked awake and jumped to its bony feet. It screeched, high and piercing, and darted out of its nest. Jareth and the dog gave chase.

The cockatrice headed towards the shout. It crowed again and a gout of flame burst forth and set the moss on fire. Jareth swore as he and the dog hurdled the bank of flames. The dog loped along with ease compared to Jareth's jerky sprint in his leather cloak.

"Get on my back," said the dog. It slowed and Jareth swung himself up and they were off again. The King buried his hands in the mossy fur and clung, trying not to look as undignified as he felt. He was the  _Goblin King_ , damn it. Goblin Kings flew on owl's wings or vanished and appeared at whim. They did not ride the backs of Cù-Sìths like a common peasant.

The dog picked up its pace to come level with the cockatrice, keeping at least a tree between them. The bird crowed and flamed and acted as mad as a fire-breathing chicken is wont to do. Its two legs ate up the ground in huge thumping strides, leaping over roots and bouncing off trees.

Jareth bent low over the dog. At long last, he caught sight of what the cockatrice chased. Far in front ran a cat the size of a dog and a girl, her white sleeves flashing in and out of sight between the trees. Up above was the snake, weaving through the treetops in pursuit. Of course,  _of course_ , she'd managed to enrage the snake. And what a snake it was, too.

The cockatrice, blind as it was, did not see the snake until it was too late. Maddened that the cat should escape its watch, it pelted forward. When close, it threw itself into the air with a great flapping of leathery wings and a fiery squawk that made Jareth's ears ring.

The snake attacked. It darted out of the canopy, mouth yawning, fangs dripping, aiming for the girl. It did not account for the fireball of chicken that hurtled into its head.

The snake screamed. The cockatrice crowed. Talons flashed and jaws clamped down, and Jareth leaned down to yank Sarah onto the Cù-Sìth's back. "Run!" the King shouted.

Cat-Sìth and Cù-Sìth raced between the trees and the left the ball of shedding feathers and writhing scales behind.

* * *

"Well, Sarah, I hope you're proud of yourself," said Jareth. He held the girl by the waist. She did not reply. He glanced down at her dark head and found her passed out against his chest.

Sighing, he asked – nicely – for the dog to take them to the griffin.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: And here we see chapter three; I realise this is stepping way out of the bounds of usual Labyrinth fanfiction (as in, she's not 22 and at college and the Labyrinth isn't calling her back, nor is it a one-shot of him appearing over and over to her in an attempt to win her over, etc.) Don't get me wrong, I love those stories and have read many, I just thought I'd try an AU that shifts events from within the film timeline and have Jareth less . . . fifteen-year-old-girl's-fantasy. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ (Plus, I rarely write fantasy and this is fun!)
> 
> Right, stick around for chapter four next week! Thanks to all my darling followers and favouriters and reviewers for enjoying a humble little fic.
> 
> God Bless!


	4. I Want To Be Where The People Are Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sarah keeps making things harder and Jareth wishes he had a different family.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Four_

* * *

I went horse riding once when I was eight. I fell off the horse, made it lame, was given a new one for intermediate level riders, and that horse bit the instructor. I did not go back. So, one can imagine my surprise when I came to and felt myself rocking back and forth on horseback.

Blinking, I looked about and saw darkness, then trees. Then memory found me. My heartrate rocketed. "The snake!"

Arms around my waist tightened. "Easy, Sarah," was murmured in my ear. "The snake and that damn chicken are long dead."

"I wouldn't get your hopes up," came another voice. It was the cat, padding alongside the horse – except it wasn't a horse, it was a bear, or a bull, or . . . those ears, a dog? I stroked it. A dog made of moss?

And that was Jareth at my back, holding me to him as we rode the moss dog to who knew where through the forest of the shadow realm. Groaning, I ground the heels of my palms into my eyes and prayed for it to end. "This can't be real," I muttered.

"Dear Sarah, I did not know I was the stuff of fantasy for you."

"Toby!" I cried. "How long has it been?"

"Stop fussing. I've paused the clock. Really, Sarah, you do get yourself into the worst of trouble. I don't know how you manage it." He was teasing and after the terror of the snake and the whole shadow realm situation, it was more than I could handle. I wrenched myself free and slid off the dog to join the cat. "Sarah," Jareth inveigled. "Don't be petulant."

"I'm not," I replied. "I'm just sick of you."

"How could that be possible?" He lounged on top of the dog, grinning, windswept and moonlit. He fiddled with his hair. Somehow his haircut had kept its style well, from the fringe to the spikes to the long strands resting on his breastplate. It must be a fae thing.

"Where are we going?" I asked the cat.

"To the griffin. It will get you back to the Labyrinth."

 _Oh, thank the heavens. I'm getting out of here._ That worry out of the way, it left me space to think on other things. Shoving the shaking fear of the snake deep into a locked box in my mind, I focused on its words instead. A Speaker, it had said. Speakers created it. "Do the things I make up in stories exist?"

"No," said Jareth. I glanced up at him. He adjusted his gloves as he spoke. "There is a certain level of belief required for things to come into reality. Generally, more than one person has to believe in the creature, or the belief has to be especially strong."

"You mean people believed in cockatrices at some point?"

"People believe anything."

"But . . . what about God? Does He exist?"

Jareth speared me with a smirk. "Someone had to believe in you lot."

"Oh. Which one is he?"

"Not sure. I think he had a son. Though that could be you Speakers filling my head with nonsense." He shrugged. "Does it matter?"

I didn't know whether to believe him – to believe any of this. But I decided then and there that when I got home, I'd find that Bible Grandma gave me for Christmas. God, huh? I'd been to Sunday school as a child, sure, but when Mom left us, Dad didn't feel comfortable returning to a church where gossip was as rife as at a high school. I'd never questioned it. Now, I wondered whether that was a fault of the people or the deity. Surely God didn't declare  _thou shalt talk behind parishioners' backs._  Someone – or something – who created all of reality must have better things to do than to listen to petty rumours.

For the first time in my life, I was curious about the ideas of the world I lived in, instead of the fantasy ones I created. Later, though. For now, the immediacy of the shadow realm and Toby was more important.

We walked along in silence for a time. The cat carefully kept me between it and the dog. I didn't blame it, seeing as the dog was massive and could probably kill the cat with one bat of those paws. Jareth appeared content to ride it, lost in his own thoughts.

 _Why are we going to the griffin?_ I wondered.  _Why can't Jareth send us back?_  I asked the cat as much in a whisper.

"The King has no power here," said the cat, rumbling lowly. "Underground royalty may have the power to get here but they must go through the griffin to get back."

"Who is the griffin?"

"The most ancient of us. He controls the ways out of the Underground."

"But – but griffins aren't that ancient, are they? Surely the gods of the Egyptians or the Aztecs are older."

"You ever see a god wish to disappear?"

"No . . . I suppose not. The eldest has to open the door then, is that it?" Sarah could understand that.

"Glad it's not me," said the cat. "New shadow walkers tend to get violent when they realise they're trapped until they die."

"But everyone dies."

"Not in Underground," said the dog. I started in surprise. Its rumbling voice bounced along my ribcage. "In Underground we were immortal."

"Not for me," the cat grumbled. "Nine lives."

"Does that mean . . ." I looked at Jareth. He smirked at the question in my eyes.

"One of a kind, darling," he said a flick of his hair. "No one can replace me."

"We're here," the dog intoned.

There was no warning. One minute the forest was there. The next it wasn't. It was like Jareth transporting me through my bedroom window all over again.

We stood in a wide crumbling valley under the same starless night. Steep cliffs rose up to box us in and narrow the sky into a strip of blackness, the moon framed between them. The false, cratered circle on the sky threw the cliffs into shards of shadow and light and lit upon a dusty valley floor. How far the valley stretched, I could not tell, for the cliffs gradually curved and hid either end from view. A breeze swept through and brought with it salt and the suggestion of sea spray.

A caw startled me. High, high up, about halfway up the cliffs, a creature soared on the void of the sky. It wheeled in and out of the moon's path on thick wings that made no sound. Another animal joined it, this one long and thin, tapering to a razor's edge. And a third, whose body was translucent. The thin bones of its wings stood out in stark silhouette against the painted moon. The trio glided around each other, spiralling and looping, and then vanished into a black hole in the face of the left-side cliff.

Jareth's expression was hateful and jealous. His hair shone silver, his self-made crown. Ah, I remembered. He disguised himself as an owl Aboveground. The ability to fly would be one of the powers he lost here. It struck me at last that he was here to  _save_ me and had given up his powers to do so.

Was I meant to be thankful? I supposed I was, if confused why he would bother. Leaving me here was a sure-fire way for him to win the game.

He caught me staring and winked and I looked away, asking aloud, "Where's the griffin?"

"The griffin comes to us," said the dog. It lowered itself to its belly, green head thumping down in a little puff of dust, and appeared to sleep. The cat twitched an ear and darted off to curl up on a nearby rock. The whole valley was littered with such rocks, fallen from the cliffs, fracturing the hardpacked dirt and coating it with grit.

Jareth slid off the sleeping dog, dusted himself down, and strode towards the base of one of the cliffs. Not knowing what else to do, I followed. He glanced back to smirk at me and continued on. Scowling at the back of his head, I jogged forward until we were side by side. His long, languid stride meant I had to quickstep to keep up.

"What are you doing?" I asked. The cliff rise higher and higher before us. It was a magnificent monochrome wall of splintered and cracking rock. More creatures shuffled along its surface in a susurrus of resettling feathers and wings. They squatted on ledges and clung to the sheer face and more than a few peered down at our progress. It seemed every winged beast of mythology hung above us. I drew closer to Jareth.

As easy as stretching, he put an arm about my shoulders and tucked me into his side. I stiffened and tried to pull away. "Relax, Sarah. I'm not going to bite." The gleaming grin he gave me was not helpful. I huffed and stopped struggling. Though awkward, his warmth and the protective shield of his cloak were comforting, like hiding under the covers during a thunderstorm.  _No use fighting it_ , I reasoned.  _This will all be over soon and you will never see him again._

My heart twinged at the thought. I ignored it. Brutally.

A rubble pile had built up the base of the cliffs, the fallen debris of avian occupation. Jareth released me to scrabble – in a kingly fashion – over the boulders. I did not miss the contact. I didn't.

"What are you doing?" I repeated.

"Checking in on family," he replied.

"You have a family?" I couldn't believe I said it as soon as it left my lips.

"Unfortunately, thanks to your Speakers." He sounded calm but I sensed the bitterness and cast my eyes to the ground in shame.

We managed to get to where the top of the pile met the cliff. Or, rather, where the top of this section of the pile met the entrance to a cave. Or, rather, a jagged, narrow slit that threatened to cut us open.

"How do you know they're here?"

"Do you doubt me, Sarah?"

 _Yes._ I shook my head and gestured for him to go first. He did so with a nauseating flourish of a bow. His long, lean figure slid into the slit with ease. I went through with much more trepidation, not breathing, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, whap, ouch, my knee, shuffle, shuffle, that almost took my eye out, shuffle,  _finally._ I burst through to the other side and gasped first for breath, and then in amazement.

The scent of the ocean – seaweed, salt, seafoam – filled my nose and lungs and body and I gazed, gaping, around the cavern. It was covered from its curving ceiling to the bottom of the inset pool in mosaics of mermaids and fish of all shapes and sizes and horses being ridden by children and men with blue skin hiding in caves. The mosaic was lit by the pool water itself. The liquid glimmered, splashing beams of green on the walls and painting the children in a sickly cast.

The pool was not large, but it branched off into tunnels leading further into the cliffside. Through these tiled tunnels came the same sea breeze, cold and refreshing.

Movement caught my attention. In the rightmost tunnel, the light danced over the tentacles of the kraken as a shape cut through the water. It headed towards us in languid curves.

Jareth placed a hand on the small of my back and nudged me right to the lip of the pool. There we knelt, waiting, tracking the shape as it glided closer and closer. A tail. Arms. Hair, pale and rippling. This was one of my favourite fantasy creatures. I smiled, thrilling with excitement.

The mermaid's shining head broke through the glowing water, rising, rising, white, silken fingers resting on the lip of the pool and arms framing her naked chest. I blushed and fixed my eyes on her beautiful face. She winked at me. One eye was the brightest blue. The other light brown.

"Hello, Mother," said Jareth.

"Darling," said the mermaid, and she stroked the King's thin cheek with the smooth planes of her nails. The whole chamber echoed with her voice. It drifted as if caught on underwater currents. A piano's strings being plucked underwater. The siren call that sings sailors to their doom. It touched the soul and you wished to be closer to it. To touch wonder, to be more than human. That voice would take you to where you could dance among the waves and taste the rainbow in the ocean spray, if only you would trust it.

Jareth's arm struck out and hit me in the chest and I was stopped from falling. I teetered on the edge of the pool. A second later and I would have tumbled into the unearthly green waters. The mermaid laughed and my heart ached to follow her as she twisted away and stretched her pale arms. She floated in the centre of the pool, sighing and watching us.

"You do not visit me," she told Jareth.

"I have my kingdom to run."

"More like keep, is it not? When will you open the ways again and free your leper colony?"

"You know I cannot."

"You could at least visit me here. Is that so dangerous?"

Jareth's thin lips curved down, his brow puckering. He tugged me closer to him and wrapped me in the cloak. It was like nestling under the wing of a warm, lean bat. The mermaid smiled.

"Careful, darling. A girl's heart is easily stirred."

I hurriedly changed the subject, "How can you be his mother? He has legs," and put my foot in my mouth again.

With a wonderful laugh, she said, "You think he's like you. Sweetheart, he is as far from you as the sun is from the moon. We don't play by your Speaker rules."

"Why are you here? Why did you want to disappear?"

She pressed a finger to her lips. "We all have our stories."

"My father," said Jareth. "She was escaping him."

She shrugged and the delicate collarbones shifted under their thin covering. "I could have been a Queen if I stayed and made the Labyrinth more glorious than Atlantis ever was. Alas, it is not to be. I like it here. Though it would be nicer if my son visited more often." She flicked her tail and water sprayed over us and hung, sparkling, on our skin and clothes. It shone like tiny emerald stars on Jareth's cloak.

"Mother, you know I cannot, for the same reason you came here instead of being Queen."

Her tail slapped the surface. "The Labyrinth  _chose_  you to be King!"

The cry rang around us and dove headlong into the tunnels. We were left with lapping water in its wake. The mermaid moved through the pool towards the central tunnel. Her face was set in stone.

"You were the one to abandon me, Mother. I will do my duty towards you and no more." Jareth's voice rumbled, as ancient as the movement of the continents, unstoppable, while the mermaid's dissipated in the sea-soaked air as she whispered, "I am relegated to an afterthought, am I? No matter. No matter." She turned and swam into the tunnel. The shifting light on the tunnel's walls marked her path. "The sea cannot be bound. It was folly of your father and of you to think so. Until next time, darling." Her singsong words drifted on the breath of the ocean and sank into the pool. We were alone, Jareth and I and the rippling faces of the mosaics.

"I can see the resemblance."

Jareth laughed, harshly, and rested back on his hands. The cloak fell from my shoulders. A chill swept over me. I rubbed my arms.

"Are you scared, Sarah?" he crooned.

"Of what? You? Of course not," I snapped. If anything I was disappointed that one of my favourite fairy tale beings had turned out to have such terrible maternal instincts. "Are all mermaids like that?"

"Like what?" Fabric rustled. I glanced back to see him reclining, head pillowed in his hands. Was he seriously going to sleep in this place? "Awful?"

"Bad mothers."

"It comes with the territory, I believe. Most beings of the sea care little for their offspring."

"Dolphins and whales do. They protect their children for years and some whales even babysit while the mothers go in search of food."

"You might have noticed, but my mother is neither a whale nor a dolphin. She's the culmination of your sailors' dreams and nightmares. She's the siren that bewitches them to their death, over and over again. Commitment is not a big part of her nature." He opened one eye and peered at me. "I'm sure you understand."

I bristled and leapt to my feet. I headed for a mosaic of a mermaid on a rock, singing to a ship at sea. "My mother is wonderful," I said. "She's an actress, everyone knows about her. At the moment she's in this new play called Phantom of the Opera and everyone says she's fantastic."

"She left when you were twelve, did she not?"

I did not answer him, having no intention of being derided. He was a mystical fairy creature who ruled over ragamuffin goblins in the centre of a rundown maze. What did he know about human nature?

He sighed. "Mortals. You cling to what you should rightly forget, even if it hurts."

"It's called  _love_." I traced the edge of a mermaid's profile. Her huge blue eye gazed towards the ship. Her hands reached for it and her hair cascaded to lie in curls on the rock beneath her. She was lovely and cold and distant, and for a second I could swear the hair was black, not blonde, and her eye was dark like in the photographs on my bedside table.

"I wish I was with you," I murmured.

"Be careful what you wish for," he whispered in my ear. I jumped in shock, fell forward, and fell  _through_ the mosaic of the mermaid. I didn't even have time to scream.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: Oh look, our first cliffhanger. Sarah has met a cat and dog and siren and griffin and evil snake, plus a dwarf, a gaggle of goblins, and the Goblin King, so what could possibly be waiting for her through that wall? Hmmm . . .
> 
> And fun fun! We get to see more of Jareth and what makes him tick. Turns out his mom is a siren/mermaid/selkie/merrow (I play around with mythology a lot in this, as you see) - who knew?
> 
> Let me know what you thought and check back in three days for chapter five.
> 
> Love ya :)


	5. Family Values

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jareth's parents were not the MVPs and neither was Sarah's mother.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Five_

* * *

Jareth stared at the place where Sarah had been and groaned to himself. He raised his gloved right hand and felt the cool tiles of the mosaic. Unyielding. Fabulous.

Hating it already, he shouted, "Mother!" into the tunnels of the cavern and waited for the rebounding word to reach her. She would come. For all her unruly, whitecap nature as was right to her, she at least enjoyed being in his company when he called. Whatever she might say, the shadow realm was a lonely existence.

"So soon, darling?" she cooed, swishing up to him. Pale lips spread across pearlescent teeth. "Your girl has managed to vanish from the world of vanished things, I see."

"Where has she gone?" he demanded.

"How would I know that? I swim, I dive, I do not fall through walls."

Jareth crouched and his mother pushed herself up until they were at eye level. Her strong tail beat at the silent water to hold her in place. "Mother, where does that wall lead?"

"She is a Speaker. We've never had one of those before. I'm interested to see what she does." His mother patted his cheek and slipped down below the surface. He lunged for her, stopping mere inches above the glowing water. She fluttered her fingers at him, and her wavering figure dove down, down, down into the bottomless well at the base of the pool. Gritting his teeth in frustration, he rose to his full height and peered at the image of the mermaid. He'd seen this mermaid many times in his visits here and every time she was blonde and blue-eyed. The picture-perfect image of his mother, a creature he both loved and despised.

Loved for her attempts at loving him.

Despised because she had fled and left him to fight his dying father.

Meeting her never failed to anger him. He remembered that catastrophic year and wondered – against his own wisdom – what might have happened if she'd stayed and ignored the Labyrinth's orders and kept the damn ring. She would have been queen. He wouldn't have to deal with this.

Jareth didn't know whether it was a mortal who decided to make his father even greedier and madder on his sickbed, or if it was God's work, but by the time the old king had died, he'd left a poisonous legacy in his wake and Jareth was left alone to fend for the crown and the deteriorating . . . everything.

It took him many a year to discover the path to the shadow realm – the ways of the other planes of reality are not revealed in a book, one must earn the right to them by searching – and when he did, it took more years to find his mother. When he found her in this cavern at last, singing to herself and as he ever knew her. Shifting and wandering like the tide. She gave him no answers, no ways to save his ruined kingdom. It was 'darling, darling, your father is dead, how long since I last saw you,' and her swimming out of his grasp to somewhere he could not follow. His beautiful, unknowable mother. His insane, dead father. And him, trapped by a long life and a long purpose and the old king's curse.

Jareth glared at the mosaic, angry for brooding over something he'd long since come to terms with. He had a girl to find and a Labyrinth to run and a child to add to his ranks.

The mermaid Sarah fell through was not the same one he remembered. Instead of blonde hair and the large blue eye, her hair was dark and her eye brown. The hair was straight and fell midway down her back. Except for the eye colour, she looked like Sarah.

She looked like Sarah's mother.

Jareth left the cavern without a backward glance, descended those broken rocks with as much grace as he was able, and snapped at the dog and cat to get up. Dozens of creatures took flight at his shout and spun into the sky, up and up and up, towards the moon and out over the planes beyond the jagged edges of horizon.

"The griffin isn't here yet," moaned the cat. It rolled over and curled up on its other side.

"Where is it?" Jareth hissed.

"It will come," intoned the Cù-Sìth.

Jareth knew from his visits that the griffin hid among the tops of the cliffs, where no land creature could get to it. It would come, eventually, it always came, but by then it might be too late.

A shadow walker cannot leave the shadow realm. Here, in the dark and the dim, it was easy to hide and be invisible. Such was the essence of a shadow walker and what sustained them. If any of the vanished beings spent time amongst the sun striders, Under or Above, they would certainly die as a shadow is blotted out by light.

_Honestly, Sarah. How do you do this to yourself?_

* * *

I was in a dressing room. It was one I knew intimately, lush in reds and creams and heavy velvet furniture as befitting the lead actress. The crystal chandelier's light bounced off the glass panes on every wall. Behind the glass were preserved clippings and signed posters and portraits. Most of them starred the same woman – Linda Williams. One of the clippings was on my mirror at home, of Linda with another renowned actor named Jeremy Slagle. My mother and her boyfriend.

Mom's dressing room. I grinned, tracing a finger over her frozen face.

I froze in shock. My hand . . . it was  _grey._ And I could feel a slight pressure when it touched the glass but nothing more. No temperature or texture.

There was a full-length mirror embedded in the armoire. I ran to it. It reflected a mirror world of the dressing room that didn't have me in it. The truth of what it meant to be a shadow walker struck me for the first time. I couldn't be here. The cat said I'd die if I spent too long outside the shadow realm. I had to get back to Jareth and the griffin and rescue Toby.

Fear, the same as I felt when falling into the dark place and the fear of the snake, came upon me as I stood, unmoving and untouched, in my mother's dressing room. I visited only a few months ago for my fifteenth birthday, when Jeremy and Mom took me to dinner and Jeremy danced with me and laughed about the gossip fodder and paparazzi. Here I was, back in the same place, and terrified that I was about to die.

The door opened and Linda Williams drifting in.

"Mom!" I cried in relief, running to her, then darting to the side because she was about to walk into me. She rubbed her forehead, sighed, and riffled through a drawer in her dressing table. She found a tiny tube of pills, shook three of the yellow discs out into her palm, and swallowed them dry. Then she collapsed on her chair and cupped her face in her hands. A painted, tired reflection stared back from her dressing table mirror, red-eyed, draped in a silk and lace robe of black. It barely covered the glittering, layered wedding cake of Christine Daae's final costume. She'd finished tonight's performance, then.

"Mom?" I whispered, and she rubbed her forehead again.

"Bloody headache. Today of all days." There was a knock at the door. "What!?" I started. I'd never heard her so sharp before.

"Miss Williams, Jeremy is here to see you," said the hesitant, muffled girl on the other side.

"Tell him to wait downstairs. I'll be out in a minute."

"Okay. You were wonderful tonight, Miss Williams."

"Sure, sure. Thanks, Chelsea." Linda buried her face in her hands and groaned as the footsteps diminished and left earshot. Outside the dressing room was a wealth of muted shouting and celebration and crashing of the stage being rearranged for the next performance. I listened in awe, imagining the time when I would be part of that world and have a dressing room of my own, just like this one, though I'd be playing Ophelia or Juliet, a beautiful tragic heroine. My performance would move people to tears, Shakespearian dripping from my lips as easily as breathing. It would be glorious.

Mom coughed. A great hacking cough that sent her scrambling for the handkerchief on her dresser. Her whole body shuddered as if her lungs were trying to propel themselves through her throat. I went to her side, hands hovering over her shoulders, crying, "Mom? Mom, what's wrong?"

She grimaced, threw the cloth down, and tipped another three pills into her hand and swallowed them with a glass of water. When she removed the glass from her lips, blood curled and spread in the remaining liquid. I raised my hand to my mouth. Linda smiled at herself in the mirror and her teeth were stained red.

"Give it to 'em, woman," she told herself. She got up and went through a door into her en suite bathroom, where I heard water running and splashing and the sound of cloth falling to the ground. There was the tugging of laces and a thump and she sighed in relief.

A circus romped around my mind. My mother was sick, really sick. How could that be? Why hadn't she said anything? What were in those pills? Did Dad know? Did Jeremy?

One of those questions could be answered right now. I picked up the bottle and read the label.  _DHC Plus – Dihydrocodeine. Take 1-2 tablets every twelve hours. Warning: opiate overuse can lead to respiratory depression, coma and death, and dependence. Do not consume alcohol when using DHC Plus._

Mom came out of the bathroom wearing an evening gown of sheer gold, made opaque around the breasts and groin and butt by floral detailing. Her back was exposed down to her tailbone. The dress looked as though it had been melded with her flesh. I was stunned. Any sign of the coughing, ill woman of before was gone.

She leaned over to check her makeup in the mirror, adding a little more colour to her lips, and had to catch herself from falling when her supporting arm gave way. Her dark, shiny hair fell over her shoulders and into the v between her breasts. Cautious, I leaned over with her, almost cheek to cheek, and saw the eyes of her reflection. Though brown to my green, they were the same shape as mine – I'd been told many times that I was the spitting image of my mother, and I hoped that was true because she was an international beauty – but right then they were alien. The pupils were contracted to near specks inside the brown irises.

She straightened and I reared out of the way. She picked up a gold, glittering clutch and placed the bottle of DHC Plus into it. I blinked, sure I'd been holding it, but it had been there on the table for her to pick up.

A packet of cigarettes lay amongst the detritus of the dressing table – broken compacts, open lipsticks, dozens of used facewipes covered in makeup. She lit up, sucked deep, and closed her eyes in ecstasy. "Time to face the music," she sang to herself, and snatched the long maroon coat from the back of the door.

I darted after her into the wall of noise outside the dressing room. I grimaced, almost pained by the commotion. Mom, on the other hand, wafted through the halls of the backstage area, nodding and smiling and kissing the stage workers and appearing in a higher plane of tranquillity. They smiled back and congratulated her on another performance and asked where she was going for the evening. "The Broadway Gala," she replied.

"Oh, very nice."

"Grab some leftovers for us, will you?"

"Enjoy the dancing!"

She didn't hear their comments in her wake; the,

"She's high again."

"Poor thing, the stress is getting to her."

"Never want to be in her shoes. It's chaos up there."

"How much do you think the Journal would pay for a backstage story?"

Linda made her way to the auditorium of the theatre. Grand staircases swept in intertwining circles to the marble entranceway, and more crystal chandeliers, some as big as the moss dog, twirled around each other in the centre. We descended the stairs, me half a step behind, to where a dozen or so patrons loitered, waiting for her arrival. The red carpet muffled her stilettos and Jeremy noticed her before anyone else. He didn't smile as I expected him to. His eyes narrowed instead. No reaction showed on her face.

"Linda!" cried one of the women. She detached herself from her date and reached Linda at the bottom of the steps, arms outstretched. Linda took her hands graciously, as if receiving a subject of her kingdom. It put me in mind of Jareth. Where was he?

"You were a star," said the woman, who was not nearly half as beautiful as my mother and had buckteeth for the bargain. They kissed each other's cheeks and smiled. "Will you sing for us tonight?"

"I have another week of performing," said Linda. "I must save my voice."

"Of course, of course. It's a shame to deprive us."

"Another time. The New Year soiree, perhaps."

"I will hold you to that." The woman winked and relinquished Linda.

Jeremy stepped in and took her by the waist and, with a smile of pure adoration, murmured in her ear, "I cannot believe you. You will kill yourself at this rate."

Linda blew a cloud of smoke and whispered, "It's either me or my lungs." She smiled, beneficent and loving, "I'd prefer to go out in style."

He stiffened and was about to speak again, when she clapped her hands and declared that the party awaited. "Maxine, Harold, would you like to join us in our car? We have so much to catch up on." The bucktoothed woman and her date nodded in pleasure and the party moved towards the towering double doors and the cool of the night.

The light had begun to burn my eyes, brightening until I could hardly bear to look. I placed a hand over my face and muttered, "Mom, wait . . ."

Through my fingers I glimpsed a portly man with impressive sideburns hold his head and groan. "Migraine. Haven't had one in years."

I squinted and saw everyone wincing. Everyone except Mom, that is. My Mom took drugs and she was gliding onto the street while I remained rooted in the foyer. I reached for her and gasped at the sight of my arm. It darker grey now, almost black. The suggestion of clothes and wrinkles and knuckle remained in vague shapes that disappeared when seen straight on.

_I'm turning into a shadow!_

There was a pain in my chest. A twinge, a twang, a throb that ached a little more with every beat of my heart. I rubbed at my sternum but it didn't go away. If anything, it got worse. I stumbled back into another person and found myself held by a pair of leather-clad arms that I would know anywhere. "Jareth!"

"Hush," he murmured, fully coloured. He wasn't of the shadow realm anymore, then. Of everywhere in Aboveground, he'd found one of the only places he'd fit in with his mad hair and leather armour.

"Jareth, my Mom, she's dying."

"So are you, Sarah. Time to go. I have paused the clock in the Labyrinth, but I can do nothing for the one inside you." I allowed him to lead me towards the shadows below the gallery. My entire being hurt, from my toes to my head to my soul.

Jareth took a crystal ball from his cloak and threw it at the ground. We stepped through the grey haze together.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: Yar. Meet Linda Williams
> 
> (fun fact: did you know that Sarah's step-mom is actually called Irene in the official manga sequel, but in fanfiction land most people call her Karen? I wonder what the OG fanfic was that started it all. Hmm, food for thought. Kudos to you, fanfic author who came up with Karen.)
> 
> See you soon!


	6. Turn and Face the Strange

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jareth discovers sand is not conducive to heels, and Sarah almost dies - again.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Six_

* * *

The figure dressed in black contemplated. He had never before heard silence this deep. The goblins made sure of that. Sand dunes, bathed in silver, rolled out from his feet and undulated endlessly to the horizon. A vast frozen ocean for him to survey.

Kingdoms, empires, had fallen and been swallowed by deserts such as this. Rulers lost their fame to death and time. Fine grains swept over the ruins and huddled in corners and grew on themselves until the desert was unbroken once more. History moved on.

But not for him. He had inherited his kingdom and he had no intention of relinquishing it. As long as he existed – which was forever – the Goblin City and its Labyrinth would prevail, no matter what state it was in. While humans and their petty squabbles led to decay and death, he remained immutable on his throne. Nothing could defy him.

His Speaker scrambled down the mercury slope, into a valley between the dunes, and stormed off into the darkness. The white arms of her flowing shirt flashed back and forth.

He sighed. "Sarah, come back!"

"No!"

With a grace that heeled shoes on sand should have made impossible, he stalked after her. The leather cloak trailed behind him, creating a smooth path that hid their footsteps.  _Just as well_ , he thought.  _There are things in this desert worse than the snake._

"Leave me alone," Sarah spoke without facing him. "I need to think."

"If only you had that luxury."

"What?" Now she turned. "I thought you'd stopped the clock in the Labyrinth?"

"Oh, I have. I am a fair ruler." She scoffed. He ignored her, "but I have no powers here. I can't do a thing to save you from any creature your kind conjured up."

That made her pause. She threw a wild-eyed glance around them and lunged for the nearest dune. Scrabbling at the sand, she crawled to the summit. Jareth smirked and reappeared beside her . . . except he didn't. Because he had no powers.

Clicking his tongue, he traversed the rise and managed to stop himself from falling even if it took a good deal longer than Sarah's uncouth ascent. He was a  _king_ , he would take as much time as he needed. Nothing could hurt him here anyway – Underground monarchs were off limits.

He assumed.

"What is out there?" asked Sarah nervously.

"The desert people of Above were rather imaginative. My favourites of theirs were the Djinn and the Mongolian death worm, among others."

"Why would anyone want to believe in a death worm?"

"Why would anyone want to believe in a mermaid?"

"Because mermaids are beautiful!"

"And not much else."

Sarah glanced at him, lips thinning. She wrestled with sentiment and awkwardness and he watched on, amused. He hadn't meant to introduce her to his mother, it was a matter of circumstance. He didn't realise what an impact it might have.

"It must have been hard, growing up unable to be close to her. I'm sorry." She crossed her arms. Her own mother, no doubt, was weighing heavily on her mind. In the short time she'd been in the shadow realm, she had aged beyond her years.

Caught by uncharacteristic sympathy, he moved to wrap her in his cloak – this was becoming a bad habit – when she muttered, "I wish there was some light here that  _wasn't_ that moon."

"What have you done now?" he hissed.

The ground opened up beneath her and she fell, screaming, into a dark hole within the sand dune.

Jareth ran his hand over his face and wished he was back in his throne room.

* * *

I dug my fingers into the sides of vertical shaft – how could I be falling  _again_? – and found no purchase except crumbling sand. It got into my open mouth and I started hacking and hit the ground all at once. My feet and knees and hands crunched into a substance that was both hard and liquid and made of many small things. I spat out sand.

"Ow. Why does this place keep  _doing_  that?"

"Sarah?" Jareth called from above. The fake moon shone hung right over the hole and his fluffy white hair was near transparent against it.

"I'm all right!" I cried. "How do I get out of here?"

"Wish it." The implied  _you fool_ was heavy in his voice. I scowled.

 _Egotistical jerk_.  _Would it kill him to be nice for once? Hey, wait a minute, there's light in here._

The hole connected to a long tunnel that curved out of sight in both directions. Along its roof, tiny green and gold lights flickered on and off. The effect was mesmerising and, stunned, I crept a short way into the tunnel and stretched up on my tiptoes to see what was making the light.

Half a foot overhead, hundreds of grotesque bugs appeared and died and fell to land in mounds on the bottom of the tunnel and more popped into existence to replace them. Pincers and stingers and thousands of legs everywhere. Beady eyes glowing red. Abdomens engorged with poison. These were the crawling nightmares of children everywhere who wondered what lived under their bed or in the cloudy web-strung corner of the garage or in the hollow whorl of an old tree. I screamed then snapped my mouth shut because a glowing yellow centipede flickered out and hit my cheek. It was slimy and soft, and its feet twitched against my skin, caught in the tiny hairs.

"Eugh!" I smacked it off into the ankle-deep drifts of dead critters. Carcasses crunched under my moccasins as I made my way back to the safety of the roof-less shaft.

Free from dropping bugs, something struck me as odd. If the death rate was so high, why were there so few dead ones on the ground? It should only take a matter of hours to fill the tunnel to the brim.

I had bigger things to worry about. "I wish," I began. The rest of the words failed to come. A wish to be up on the sand could end me anywhere in the desert. If I wished to go home, I would turn into a shadow. Wishing for the griffin might send me falling to my death from hundreds of feet in the air if the half-eagle beast was flying.

"Oh, why does everything to be so difficult!"

The tunnel was shuddering. It started in the floor and vibrated up my legs and into my lungs and my breathing turned shaky. The raining of the bugs became a downpour as live ones were shaken loose.

Frozen in dread, I watched a thick-bodied cylindrical creature come around the corner. It moved along by telescoping and extending its segmented body and scraping every inch of the tunnel's circumference with its bulbous red skin, cast dried-blood-brown in the bugs' green light. Rows and rows of sharp teeth protruded around a cavernous mouth. The bottom teeth scraped through the dead bugs and shovelled them up into the darkness of its lumpy, writhing body.

The Mongolian death worm. It had to be.

I tried to speak. My voice cracked. I tried again and the worm was closer and closer every second and if I didn't know any better, it had noticed me. The teeth twitched. It moved faster. Beads of liquid bubbled through pores in its skin and killed any bug on contact and they fell onto the bottom teeth and were consumed.

"I wish," I whimpered.

A vapor started to spill from its mouth and pooled amongst the dead. It was five feet away.

"I wish I was . . ."

Four.

"I wish . . ."  _What did I wish?_

Three. The vapor was almost as my toes.

"I wish I was with Jareth!"

I fell on him. He yelped and we went rolling down the bank of the dune into a valley. We settled in a heap. I felt leather under my cheek and gasped and scrambled off him. "That's one way to do it, I suppose," he murmured in that light, amused tone that never failed to make me angry.

"I almost died! What were you doing?"

"Finding a Djinn." He pointed up the dune. At the top of the groove we'd created crouched a humanoid figure. It slid down to the valley as easy as snowboarding, did a flip, and squatted an inch from my legs.

"Pretty," it rasped. It had a purple face and curving horns like an antelope. The eyes were too big and glistening. "Pretty, pretty, pretty. Let's make a deal."

"No need," said Jareth. "She's safe and sound."

"You called me. I came. We make a deal!" It bounced in place and poked me in the cheek with a thick black nail. I cringed inwardly but didn't dare to move. It could spear me with those horns in a single thrust.

"What do you want?" I asked.

It grinned and its grin was too wide as well. "Pretty girl gives me something?"

"Be careful, Sarah. Djinn are not friendly."

 _Yeah, I guessed that on my own, thanks._ "I can give you anything you wish, in exchange for you showing us how to get to the griffin," I said.

"Anything I wish? Anything, anything, anything. There are so many things." Its breath stunk of bugs and arid desert.

"Pick one."

"Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. I want, I want, oh! I want a master!"

"A master? Why?"

"Masters give Djinn purpose." Its grin turned wicked. "And something to play with. You could be my master." A picture had been carved into the skin of its hollow chest, barely visible in the darkness. If I wasn't mistaken, it depicted humans being sacrificed on an altar. A pair of antelope horns presided over the altar like angel wings. I hoped it was a trick of the moonlight.

"Fine," I said. "But first you need to show us how to get to the griffin."

Its long black nail stabbed at a random sand dune in the distance. "Walk that way and you will be on the right path. Now! Master!"

"Hey, you have to tell us more than that!"

"No, I don't." It leaned in so close its pointed nose touched mine and I tried not to retch. Or scream. Or both. "I showed you the way. If you don't like it, I'll poison you."

"Listen to it. Djinn are harbingers of death and disease."

 _Why didn't you tell me that_ before _?_

"I wish," I said through gritted teeth, "that this Djinn of the shadow realm desert will have a master who it can stay beside forever."

The Djinn reared back in delight and clapped its hands. I smiled.

"And I wish its master to be the Mongolian death worm of the shadow realm!" I cried.

It screamed and popped out of sight.

Jareth clapped twice. "Well done, Sarah."

"No thanks to you," I retorted and got up and marched up the sand dune in the direction the Djinn had pointed. The silvery sand slid out from under me with every step and trickled into my shoes and made me feel like I was walking on the desert barefoot. "Can I even trust that thing?"

"Djinn are generally trustworthy, if vague."

"I had a thought. Why don't I just wish myself to stop being a shadow walker? Won't that work?"

"You could try, though perhaps you'd prefer to follow a more orthodox route just this once. As much as I enjoy subversion, this is your life we're discussing, and the baby's too."

"True," I sighed. "Okay, to the griffin it is."

We were interrupted by the shifting of a dune at our backs and a hysterical, cackling laugh.

The Djinn sprang up and screamed, "Get them!" and the Mongolian death worm exploded out of the sand, spraying granular mercury over the King and I.

"Hmm. It did seem too good to be true."

"Shut up! I wish Jareth and I were safe!"

* * *

"It's even worse dead than alive."

"Why  _here_? How is this safe?"

"A dead cockatrice is thought to be bad luck. The other shadow walkers will avoid it."

"How is it bad luck?"

"Do you feel lucky?"

"No, I suppose not. I wonder where the snake's gone."

"I don't see why you didn't wish us to the griffin's area."

"What if the griffin is flying? We'd fall to our deaths."

"You could wish us to the base of the cliffs."

"Fine!"

* * *

I sat on the same rock the cat had occupied not long ago. It seemed an age. Turning into shadows, seeing suicidal mothers, and almost being eaten by death worms had a way of lengthening one's experience of time.

While Jareth went to visit his mother again, I stared up at the luminous winged creatures on the cliffs and tried to guess what myth each was from. Flying beasts weren't much touched upon on Celtic mythology. I knew plenty about Seelie and Unseelie fairies and all of Shakespeare's characters. I had no name for the bird so huge it blotted out the moon as it flew.

It must be odd having to go to a world of shadows to meet your mother. Even worse to live in fear that one day it wouldn't be her waiting in the pool but the mermaid who replaced her. Though, perhaps no odder than becoming the embodiment of a lack of light and watching your mother cough up blood and declare herself suicidal to the boyfriend whom she left your father for.

The mermaid said that Jareth and I were as far from each other as the sun is from the moon. I thought that wrong. We had a connection in bad mothers.

There were nights when I cried for hours, my whole chest in pain because Mom left Dad and I for a highflying life we couldn't give her, because we weren't enough for her.

_Don't get upset, turns out not even life is enough for her._

My mind was as dark as the world around me. I lay back, arms splayed, and stared at the great false moon with unfocused eyes and hated everything. It was easy. Turned out when I gave my mind free rein, it took issue with a lot.

I had a headache as well. I hated headaches. They ruined your experience of everything and made it impossible to believe that the world was worth enjoying. How could you, when the very organ made to enjoy things was throbbing and hurting inside its black cavern?

I wanted to go home, back to when Mom was still my idol and not bitter and dying, back to when Toby cried and I complained and thought it just, back to when I could get angry at Karen and not feel guilty about it. After seeing what Mom had done to herself in her attempt to attain some glorious height of fame and excitement, my respect for Karen had grown. She loved my father and didn't ask him to be anything more than the kind, quiet man he was.

Introspection sucked and people were difficult to understand and I wanted to hug Lancelot.

The griffin descended on a swoosh of feathers and a quiet scrape of eagle's talons and lion's claws. The front half was the eagle, the back the lion, and together formidable and as large as a fully-grown elephant. It sat on its lion hindquarters and aimed eyes like marbles at me. I glanced at it and let my head flop back to the rock.

"Jareth will be here soon."

"I am here for you, child," it said. Its voice was a curious combination of bird screech and cat growl.

"All right." I pushed myself up and crossed my legs, Indian style, on the rock. "How do I stop being a shadow walker?"

The beak clacked and English came out. "Few have done so and at great cost."

"Tell me."

"For one to enter the shadow realm, one wishes to be invisible and takes the place of that which came here before it. To escape to live with the sun striders again, the same must occur."

"So, I wish to be visible and . . ."

"Take the place of that which came before you."

"What does that mean? Who came before me?" The griffin waited.

My headache throbbed and spat a horrible idea into my consciousness.

"Do you mean my parents?"

The griffin bowed its head.


	7. Such a Sad Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we lose a Williams and the Labyrinth loses its protection.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Seven_

* * *

"No! No, no, no, this place is horrible! I can't kill my parents!"

"Parent. You only need wait for one to die."

"That's just as bad!"

"I would not say so. Simply wish to be visible and soon enough you will be free of this realm."

"What do you mean 'soon enough?'"

The griffin said nothing.

I sprinted for the cliff, scraping my hands on jagged edges and banging my knee again in passing through the slit. "Sarah?" said Jareth. In the corner of my eye a shimmering pale tail slapped the pool and water sprayed over me. I paid it no mind and hurtled, one hand outstretched, through the mosaic that resembled my mother.

The mosaic had as much substance as a screen of water. On the other side, the darkness swapped places with bright, garish light. It came from flickering tubes in frosted plastic cases and accompanied the sharp tang of antiseptic.

A vague memory of a looming nurse came back to me, her sweet voice saying, "Take a deep breath, darlin', the laughing gas will make you all better," and me being disappointed when, instead of laughing, I went to sleep. I remembered getting into the taxi with Dad and waking in my bed the next day. In the mirror, a ten-year-old girl screamed at the purple egg where her left eye had been the day before. The white around the iris was the colour of blood. It freaked out all the girls in class. The boys whispered, "Cool."

I couldn't remember where Mom was at the time. She'd left us by then and Karen had yet to come along and it was just Dad and I, the single Dad whose daughter had faceplanted out of a tree. According to the nurse, he'd cried in the ambulance. It was the first I'd ever heard of him doing so – he hadn't cried when Mom walked away.

Now, a prostrate golden goddess and her white handmaidens dashed past. In silence and avoiding contact, I joined the convoy. I was half-trapped in old memories and half-trapped in memories of the future, recollections of what was about to happen. It played out as I thought it would – the frantic discussions, the awe at my mother's presence, the nurses and doctors and clipboards. Her face was grey. The doctors took issue with how slow her breathing was.

_Respiratory depression, coma and death. Don't take with alcohol._

"Was she drinking?"

"Oh, yes, I think so." It was Maxine and Harold, Maxine tucked into Harold's side and wringing her hands. They were hustled away by a young doctor – too young, a child, only a few years older than me – and the door was closed, and a team of nurses and another two doctors were in the private room with Mom.

Mom. I wanted to creep closer, to touch the silken hair and whisper that it would all be okay. I wouldn't dream of taking her place in the world. I'd rather stay in the shadow realm forever if that was what it took. But she'd taken the decision out of my hands. Half her face was obscured by the mask and the insides of her elbows were becoming pin cushions for IV lines. Her heart beat a dirge on the monitor.

"She's not going to make it," a nurse whispered to a colleague.

I retreated to a corner. Slid down. Hid my face in my hands to block out the piercing lights and felt the pain in my chest in time with hers.

 _I want to be visible so I can hold her hand_.  _I want to tell her that I love her. I don't want her to die alone._

Minutes ticked by on the clock, passing through eleven and heading towards midnight. What day was it? Time had become weird and confused. Split between three realms . . . Karen and Dad might be on their date or they might be home and Toby might be sleeping on the bed of feathers or he might be an idea in Karen's mind or he might be twenty-three and married. It was irrelevant. This room, that bed, nothing else mattered.

The atmosphere quietened. The frantic energy of life clinging petered out. Resignation replaced it. It was worse. Movement meant hope.

The door opened. The tension left the space and a hand, placed on my shoulder, made me open my eyes. The lights were off except for the glow of the bedside lamp. The staff were gone. Jareth crouched before me with a crystal ball nestled in his leather palm.

"Place your hand upon it." He covered my hand with his other. The stark white of his ruffled cuffs and the pitch black of his gloves were merged in my grey flesh. The ache of my heart had swollen over my torso.

"Think of what you want to tell her."

Thought was too hard. The words wouldn't come. Sensation, emotion, came in their place and ran from my chest and my head through my arm and into the crystal. In its centre, colour bloomed. Blue, deep indigo, then crimson as blood and celery green. The three colours twined in and out of each other, hundreds of capillary thin threads. I almost forgot the point of them as I watched the threads form into a lacy scaffolding and gold growing between them. The stem was spiralled with green, the petals interdigitated with blue that served as tributaries for red edging. A gold rose blossomed inside the crystal.

"It's beautiful," I said.

Jareth slipped the crystal free of my grip and held it up to catch the light coming over his shoulder. "Quite," he murmured. "You are something else, Sarah."

He helped me to my feet and held me to his side, cloaking me, and we stepped in time to Mom's slow heart to her bedside. Her dark hair was splayed out on the pillow. I could smell cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5 coming off her, mingling with the antiseptic. Her chest barely moved.

She could be Juliet or Icarus or Dorian Gray, wanting more and more and more and ending up with nothing but shards of dreams stabbing into her palms.

I wondered if I might faint and fall on top of her but then I might really kill her instead of just profiting from her death.

My throat turned to sandpaper and I moved deeper into Jareth's embrace.

Jareth offered no platitude. He hovered the rose of emotion over her heart and dropped it. The ball and its shimmering contents sank into her skin without impact. For a brief moment, as if I had a second sight that allowed me to see inside of her, the flower brightened within her chest, then broke apart and flowed through her arteries as green and gold and red and blue and faded into the dark purple of her veins.

Her lips curved into a small, relieved smile. A tear collected a few flecks of her black mascara and left them as breadcrumbs on its way down her temple.

Jareth's fingers tightened on my upper arm and I remembered,  _I want to be visible, I want to hold her hand_ , and the pain built and Mom's heart monitor beeped.

It stopped.

I tumbled forwards and clasped her hand in both of mine. My hands were yellowy pink. Hers were ash white.

* * *

He carried her into one of the many unused bedrooms of the castle. There was a time when the castle was always full. His father liked to enjoy the company of creatures who weren't changelings of human toddlers so he kept it well stocked with inhabitants of other kingdoms and plenty to wine. The old king did not care much for the duties of the Goblin King – the Speakers who challenged the Labyrinth, though numerous in his time, weren't his main focus. No, he enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh far too much. And in the end, it was the flesh that was his end. The sickness he had feared for so long took its hold and never let go.

It took a year for the king to die. He spent that year fighting his son's right to rule. The wreckage left over when Jareth was allowed to assume the throne left the Labyrinth a mere shade of what it had been. The paths in and out had to be shut to prevent the spread of contamination. Speakers alone could come and go, unaffected by the ghastly legacy. The rest of the hapless Undergrounders – many of them not even denizens of the Labyrinth but guests caught out in that last party – were entertained with music and petty skirmishes and their own deteriorating minds.

Jareth became the Goblin King in all the title's pointless splendour and majesty and isolated them. If ever rumours sprang up among the other courts and kingdoms of Underground, he never heard them. The Speakers were met with a lonely and untouchable Goblin King. His one relief was music. There was something magic and transcendent in music. It helped him escape his prison.

In a soft explosion of dust, he settled Sarah on the round bed in the centre of the bare room. She curled on her side and stared, unfocused, at the orange sky through the window. A breeze played through her hair, bringing with it the scent of dirt and distant ocean. Jareth noticed that the bog of eternal stench was missing from the bouquet. Perfume and cigarette smoke replaced it. Ah, her fears had changed then. He would have to check what that southern region had become this time.

The aroma brought odd thoughts of change to Jareth's mind. He wondered if it was time to stop, to walk away as only he as King could and leave the curse to consume the place. It was cruelty to keep taking toddlers, knowing the degraded life he was committing them to . . . He could walk in the precious silence of the black desert and never see a face again.

He wondered if the Labyrinth might be better off without him. Not for the first time, he wondered if the old king's curse may in fact be his . . .

The amulet on his chest grew warm. It snapped him out of the chain of thought and the idea of abdication slunk away to hide in the far reaches of his mind. There was work to do.

Jareth paused by the door. "You cannot see Toby until you complete the Labyrinth. The clock will be paused until you return to the starting point."

"Is she really gone?" she whispered. "It's not a trick?"

"No, Sarah. She is gone."

On a whim, he produced a crystal, kissed it, and threw it into the air. It hovered over the bed, two feet below the ceiling. He had charmed it to echo Sarah's mood in musical form. Drifting, confused chords rolled up and down, driven by an undercurrent of darker melody. The tension in her shoulders released and she sunk, boneless, into the bedcovers. For all the world, she could have been dead.

Jareth shut the heavy wooden door and placed his hand upon the carvings. He had never seen them before – a ring of Labyrinth roses. A flower crown, perfect for the girl whose name meant princess. He left a sliver of awareness in the door, then clicked his fingers.

"Guard her," he told the goblin, barely able to look at the creature should it see his inmost thoughts in his face. "And if she should ask for anything, send for me."

The goblin nodded its bulbous head and planted itself squarely below the carvings.

He went to his sparse bedroom to remove the breastplate and cloak in favour of more simple fare, and to check on the baby. Toby sat up in the stone cot and gurgled, hands grasping at the air. When the King leaned down, the baby took hold of his amulet and tried to chew it. Jareth chuckled, stroking the fluff of hair atop the child's head, and the babe fell to slumber. He would not awake until Jareth or the Labyrinth willed him to.

That done, Jareth appeared on the edge of the southern region. For much of his childhood, he remembered it as a far-reaching cesspit of pools and streams. No one in the kingdom went close to it. It was well known that to breathe the air or touch the soil or to, unthinkably, drink the water would result in disease and, often, death.

It had flooded not long into his father's sickness. Jareth suspected it seeped into the soil of the other regions and left it all poisoned. This was why the ways were closed, lest it spread throughout the Underground. A leper colony indeed.

When the old king died, the southern region had drained and become a slow slope, rolling up and up in a cloak of cold mist to break free at the summit. Jareth walked up it once and found, on that peak under the weak sunlight, a stone grave marker so old that that inscription was lost. That did not matter. The crown squatting on top of the slab said enough. He avoided the place after that, staying indoors when the fogs of the graveyard swept through the whole kingdom.

Lately, though, the southern region had changed with the Speakers. It did not happen with all of them and had occurred four times in his reign. He wondered what it meant but who was there to ask? His mother was mute on the subject and he would not lower himself to ask a cretin such as Hoggle. He feared another hellish year of fighting and destruction on the horizon. But it wasn't possible; the ring was with his mother. No, he reasoned, it must be another manifestation of the curse.

Even the Labyrinth itself was falling apart.

When Sarah arrived, it became the bog of eternal stench. Sarah's deepest fear before the shadow realm was being tied to her baby brother forever, stuck changing diapers and never attaining the shining future she envisioned for herself.

It had changed upon her return. Once a twisted patch of mangroves and foul swamps, now buildings were smashed together in a warren stretching to the city wall. Between the buildings were overgrown courtyards and holes leading to oubliettes. Jareth cast an eye over the faded paint and watched a plaster gargoyle fall off its pedestal and crack on the tiles below. Sarah had created a hodgepodge of broken theatres. It was glorious, in a way. Sarah's idolising of her mother and her dreams of stardom were crashing to the ground before his eyes.

Jareth walked up the nearest fractured steps and through doors that teetered on broken hinges. Inside, shadowy figures drifted along every level of the foyer. They did not touch, they did not speak. They paid Jareth no mind as he went up the grand staircase and into the auditorium.

Every mouldy seat was full. The roof had fallen in on the stage and ripped the backdrop apart to reveal another auditorium. It mirrored the one he stood in. Fascinating.

The Goblin King explored and found more of the same. It copied the routes and confusion of the actual Labyrinth. He went deeper towards the centre, towards where his castle would stand. The décor became less decrepit, the air less musty, the people more coloured. They moved with purpose. They made noises like words. They reached out with sharpening hands and brushed his clothes as he passed. He captured one elegant shadow's hand, felt the idea of a silk glove, kissed the knuckles. She was warm. Colour flooded through her and she became Linda Williams in her gold dress. She smiled at him.

Tucking her arm into his, Sarah's dead mother led Jareth with confidence and grace over the marble of the final corridor. Dreamlike music drew them onwards, to the centre. A pair of men in black tuxedoes opened the double doors at the end.

In the middle of the warren lay a ballroom made of mirrors where beautiful men and women within shimmered over the dancefloor in an endless waltz of bright greens and reds and blues. In the mirrors, infinite shadow reflections copied them, stretching beyond the horizon in every direction. The ballroom expanded into a darkening forever where the lights grew dimmer and the people more indistinct. Even Jareth lost himself in the darkness in the outer reaches. But here, in the bright focal point of this repeating universe, golden Linda took Jareth's hand and brought him into the dance. He stared at her face, Sarah's future.

There came no nudge for help from the girl's room. For a time, he was free from everything, including the crown. The amulet cooled on his chest and laid there, forgotten.

Jareth smirked and spun Linda under his arm and invented lyrics to croon.

_"_ _There's such a sad love, deep in your eyes . . ."_

* * *

The room was empty except for the bed and a curtained antechamber. Behind the curtain, I found a bath set into the floor. The crystalline water promised refreshment and warmth and a moment to forget. I undressed, slithered in, and hugged my knees to my chest on the second step.

It was the best bath I could remember. The stones were not uncomfortable, and the water peeled off layers of dirt from the shadow realm. I felt cleansed from life itself.

My mother's bloody handkerchief swam through my mind's eye. I held my breath and dove under the water to escape it.

I opened my eyes and was somewhere else. The water extended far beyond the bounds of the little bath. Green tiles led into tunnels branching off the main pool and, above, the surface sparkled green.

I had no need to breathe. I floated in the mermaid's pool and waited. My nakedness meant nothing, and in the way of dreams I knew that floating was all I needed to do.

It could have been a minute or an hour or a day for which I drifted in the glow. When at last the mermaid appeared, I felt no resentment at her keeping me waiting. She came from the depths of the tunnel embedded in the centre of the pool. The sleek creature shot up and stopped to hang motionless in the water at my eye level. Her hair kept moving, rising, rippling, a cloud of white.

The mermaid smiled and held out her left hand. An odd silver ring lay in her palm. I lifted it. The ring reminded me of something, though I could not put my finger on what. Its face widened out into two points, creating a diamond-shaped setting for the embedded emblem. The emblem was made of bronze and depicted a Celtic knot of some kind. It fitted my ring finger as if made for it. The silver band felt as comfortable as the one from my mother which had been on my right hand for a year.

I closed my eyes and floated in the mermaid's pool and forgot everything.

* * *

One trapped in a dream, one trapped in a fantasy, the Labyrinth was left untended. A dwarf had been banished to the oubliette and he lit a candle. He found the door to freedom.

"Ah hah!" he cackled, setting the door against the wall. He opened it and saw darkness. "That's odd." He pushed the door closed but it met resistance. The dwarf shoved and the door shoved back, knocking him to the ground. Snarling, the dwarf leapt up and ran at the door and slammed it into the wall. "Bloody doors." He dragged it open and stomped through into the coronation room, coughing on dust. Hoggle grumbled, having never liked the great hall. He'd been one of the crowd that saw it dissolve into shadows. Some said the king feared his son taking the throne and would rather destroy the Labyrinth than lose his crown.

"He gave it a good shot," Hoggle grumbled. "Earthquakes and that cesspit flooding and horrible weather for a full year. And no way to escape, then or now."

Hoggle missed home, the chilly mountain air spun on gale-force winds and whipping through the hollow chambers and mines of Mount Korrigan.

Hoggle missed himself. His back had once been straight, his shoulders broad, his beard full and black. He had strength in his bones and power in his voice and commanded a legion of exterminators. Together, he and his team had roamed Mount Korrigan's tunnel systems and destroyed the beasts and demons roused by their endless mining.

He didn't recognise the hunched and bitter creature he'd become.

It was the time of the day when the sun hung high in the sky and little of its light came through the windows. The vaulted hall was wreathed in shadows.

The dwarf did not notice one of those shadows slip up a pillar. He was too busy mumbling to himself.

The slithering crossed the threshold into hearing.

* * *

The amulet on Jareth's chest warmed. He frowned. The foolish girl, could she not wait another hour before making herself a nuisance? He was about to vanish when Linda slipped her hand between the amulet and his sternum. The amulet's heat became the warmth of her palm on his chest, her fingernails lightly pressing into his skin. He smiled and forgot about the amulet with pleasure.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: We have reached halfway! (Kind of.) Now we go into the second half of the plot where things really aren't what they seem. Mwahaha. 
> 
> Oh, yeah. Sorry about Linda. She . . . well, it was the only way of getting Sarah out of the shadow realm. :(
> 
> Even Hoggle gets a backstory in this world. I'd love to imagine him as Thorin (à la Richard Armitage) but it's in the eye of the beholder. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you thought and I'll see you soon. 


	8. Caped Crusader

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Jareth is distracted, Sarah has to step up to the task - at least she'll look good doing it.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Eight_

* * *

The music had changed when I awoke. A man serenaded me and for a moment I wondered if I was still dreaming. His tenor promised love through pain and suffering and the world falling down and I so wanted it to be real . . .

But I opened my eyes and the ceiling was brown stone. Had I been moved? The room was different to what I remembered. In any other circumstance,  _any other_ , the suite would have left me in awe. It was all that I imagined a magic castle's bedroom should be – it had the tapestries depicting the Labyrinth and fields of flowers and the subjects revelling at their King's feet while he lounged on his throne. Underneath the open window was a writing desk that must have been a carpenter's masterpiece, a detailed and realistic tangle of mahogany roses trapped under the glass surface.

Despite the warmth of the Labyrinth, the room had a fireplace that would fit a fully-grown unicorn, horn included. In front of it were heavy chairs arranged around the hearth rug. I supposed them for the visitor to entertain other guests or spend time with whomever shared their suite. Like the bed in which I slept, the upholstery and rug were a riot of red and pink and green of roses. On the other side of the room, the curtain leading to the antechamber was coloured the same.

I guessed the decorator had intended it for a female who had an affinity – or an unhealthy obsession – with roses, for even the knobs and the edging of the dresser's mirror were shaped into the heavy buds. What caught my eye and almost piqued my interest was the carpenter's other piece of furniture – an armoire with two full-length mirrors set into the doors. It occupied the space between the dresser and the en suite's curtain and it dwarfed all but the bed and the fireplace with its size. How many dresses fitted in there? There might be a nightgown. Another time and I would have been thrilled to fling open the doors and riffle through and try on whatever hid inside.

I could find no stirrings of curiosity. That part of me had died, swiftly, smothered in my sleep. I mourned it.

_"_ _As the pain sweeps through,_

_Makes no sense for you,_

_Every thrill is gone,_

_Wasn't too much fun at all,_

_But I'll be there for you_

_As the world falls down . . ."_

The singing came from a spinning crystal ball. The voice was Jareth's. His words meant nothing to me. Lies. No one could love you through pain like this.

I was trapped here until I could deal with it well enough to run the Labyrinth for Toby.

I was going to be trapped forever.

_"_ _Falling down . . ."_

"Stop it!" I screamed and threw a pillow at the crystal. The ball flew across the room and smashed against the door. The music stopped. I let my arm drop and returned to staring at the ceiling.

The world was falling and where was he?

No one could help this. It wasn't possible. The greyness that had overtaken me in Mom's hospital room had sunk inside. It couldn't be assuaged by pretty words and dreamy music. The warmth of the bath – from this morning? Last night? – had drained away.

I wondered if I could take a pill like Mom and a glass of alcohol and drift off into oblivion.

A clink made me turn my head. Resting on the sheets, a tumbler of amber liquid sat next to four white pills on a silver tray.

Huh.

"There are other ways if you feel so inclined. Wouldn't a girl like you would prefer the drama of a knife?" How long would it take? Dad and Karen didn't need me. I was a glorified babysitter to them, and this way they could hire someone who didn't talk back. "Sarah." He sighed as if he had some stake in my life. Hah. He'd prefer me to die, that way he could keep Toby forever.

A shadow within the fireplace wavered and a pair of glowing green eyes gazed at me and blinked and I smelled moss and moonlight. Then it vanished and the shadow was only a shadow.

On my fourth finger the ring was hot, almost burning. I did not look at it, lest Jareth notice and take it from me. It was mine.

Blue and brown eyes descended to my level. They gleamed in a new, excited way. If I'd had the willpower, I might have asked him what he had been doing. As it was, I waited for him to leave so I could . . . be.

"Eat, and stop transforming my Labyrinth with your wishes," he said, and he clicked two fingers. A platter of fruit appeared in place of the glass and pills and the shards of the crystal ball vanished. Caretaking duty performed, he departed.

I knew better than to eat anything on that tray – Persephone's story had taught me well. Eating seemed despicable anyway.

"Cat," I murmured. The ring heated up. The vague outline of the cat appeared in the same shadow, its eyes the brightest part, its white breast a dull moon.  _Like Alice's Cheshire Cat_ , I thought.  _Though it was the teeth that shone._

"It's here. Use the ring to find it," said the cat.

"What's here?"

"It is no longer a shadow. A door opened and it went through. Find the –" The cat hissed, and its pupils dilated to swallow the entire green of its irises. There were no irises to see. It was gone again.

The ring cooled in its absence. I turned on my side and watched the yellow sky until sleep came.

* * *

The cockatrice decomposed into the root system of the forest on a bed of ashen moss. The snake was nowhere to be seen.

I stood in my jeans and waistcoat, despite wearing just my shirt in Jareth's Labyrinth. My moccasins kissed the leather wing of the cockatrice. The bird had died of venom, puncture marks stabbed through its pale flesh. I thought it a better way to go than inferno.

The snake's trail was marked by pieces of burnt scale and smears like oven grease over the trunks. It had tried to twist up into the branches, but splintered roots and bloody snakeskin showed where it fell. I walked along its path in silence, feeling the ring's heat.

The dog and cat joined at some indefinable time and together we found the place where the trail disappeared. A patch of moonlight shone upon untouched earth. We stopped.

"This is where you entered," said the cat. I knew that. I nodded.

"It has left our realm," said the dog.

"It will die then, won't it?"

"No," said the cat. "It was banished here, but not bound as a shadow walker. It will keep growing stronger."

"It seeks to consume."

"It's going to eat me?"

The cat growled in disdain. "Snakes will eat whatever their unhinged jaw may swallow. They are not picky."

A story came to mind, taught by our substitute history teacher who spent most of his time writing up the myths of Ancient Egypt for museum exhibits. That Wednesday he told us of Apep, the serpent that swallowed the sun.

How much easier would it be to swallow a Labyrinth?

"Use the ring to find it," the cat repeated.

"And what then?" The moss dog's snout wrinkled and bared its shiny daggers a foot from my eyes. "Got it."

I'd have to find Jareth. I had enough energy to find him and tell him the snake was there. He could have the ring and find the snake himself and I would be free to mourn in my bedroom. He was the King of this place, why should I go after this beast?

I looked at the ring and wondered why the mermaid had given it to me. A new strength – no, not strength. Peace, maybe, but peace was too kind of a word. Composure was the closest I could find to describe my mind in this shadow realm dream. Instead of feeling like I was living in a world made of grey treacle as in the Labyrinth, it was a world made of air that I could walk through and never feel it touch me. It was no harder to say, "Take me to the mermaid," than to say nothing at all.

The cat and the dog set off in a direction that must have had meaning to them. I could not distinguish it from any of the other forest paths. I kept my gaze up, on the fake moon, and examined its pits and craters and patches of glaring whiteness. It was close enough to touch if one climbed into the canopy.

"Hey diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon," I murmured. "The little dog laughed to see such sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon."

Who was to say it hadn't happened? I saw my mom pass away after a flower made from my feelings towards her was placed in her chest by the Goblin King. A cow jumping over the fake moon could have happened in the Underground.

"We're here," said the dog. They brought me to the crack in the cliff. There was no space for either creature to get through, so I went on alone. In the dim green interior, I sat at the edge of the pool, took off my shoes, and flicked my toes in the water.

The mermaid came and rose through the surface. She smiled. Her hair had a green tinge to it that I had not noticed before.

Time curled out and around itself and twisted into knots. Dreams are said to take, on average, two or three minutes, yet they can seem to span a lifetime. My breathing and my heartbeat were strangely muffled to me. I swung my feet, making ripples that broke against her throat and counted time through those.

Finally, she said, "You've come about the ring."

I nodded. "Why?"

She hummed a tune that sounded a lot like Jareth's song in the crystal ball. "It was mine, given by Jareth's father in one of his better moods."

"Why give it to me?"

"Because it needed to be given to you." She swam closer and placed a dripping hand on my knee. A dark stain bloomed through the denim and trickled down my shin. The smell of ocean was stronger with her near. "The Labyrinth needs healing. We've heard of the Labyrinth's demise even here in the shadow realm. He will not tell you, but his father went mad before he died and tried to tear the Labyrinth apart. My son fought hard to keep it safe, but by the time the king died too much had been destroyed. Jareth was so spent that his will has weakened and faded and he is unable to fight the foulness that threatens it.

"The Labyrinth needs to be healed and it's decided you are the one to do it. You are strong of will, I think, and fresh. You are not broken as my darling Jareth is." She gave me a bittersweet little smile. "Have things changed since you were there?"

Absently I said, "My bedroom was different when I awoke. Jareth thought I wished it up, but I didn't."

"You see? The Labyrinth has already recognised you. Though, caution, Sarah. The snake is strong too. Its will might overpower yours."

How could it not be? I had no will to get up from my bed except to have a bath. What was I compared to an ancient vengeful god?

"I hope you can save the Labyrinth. It was my home, for a little while. I swam in the rivers and lakes that lived underneath those walls. It is a small kingdom and not of much consequence except to those that live there. It would be a pity to lose it to the old king's stupidity."

"How can I save it? Do I wish away the snake?"

"No. Your kind may have spoken it into existence, but it has grown beyond that now. Use the ring to find the snake. And remember, you have a power of your own."

She slipped under, her hair billowing through the water in a rising cloud. I grabbed at her, tilted forward, and tumbled headfirst into the pool.

Spluttering, I scrabbled to the edge of the pool and dragged myself over and flopped onto the brown stones of the antechamber washroom. The bath water sloshed against my feet.

Lying there, I thought of falling asleep, but my soaked white shirt clung and a set of fluffy red towels sat on a stool. Once dry and warm and naked, I padded into the main bedroom and ignored the bed in favour of the armoire.

My suspicions were right – an explosion of colour and fine fabric crowded together inside. Below the dresses were rows upon rows of shoes and slippers.

Selecting a white silk slip with trailing sleeves and embroidered in lace, I sat on the floor to stare at the shoes. There were ribbons and bows and heels and boots in my size and they moulded perfectly to my feet. I selected a pair that reminded me of my moccasins, if my moccasins were made from the soft, pale gold leather. In the dresser were undergarments that fit like a second skin. If the Labyrinth had indeed created all this, I could see why the mermaid wanted to keep it safe.

I glanced at the bed. Mom – or rather, the black, dense cloud surrounding her in my mind – tried to drag me under the sheets. I took a step towards it.

The ring flashed hot and I gasped in pain. It cooled in the next instant. The black cloud receded and waited, giving enough of my mind back for me to turn from the bed and go to the doors. Time to find Jareth. Like hell was I going to face this shadow snake on my own.

A gold cloak hung on a hook. It settled on my shoulders in a grand sweep.

_No wonder Jareth wears these._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: *gasp* is this a plot I see? Indeed it is! Well, let's see where this leads us, shall we? (This is what happens when kings stop doing their job; their mothers have to recruit grief-stricken Speakers. What has the Labyrinth come to?)
> 
> See you in a few days :)


	9. Please, Mr Gatekeeper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which fate cannot be avoided (also known as Hoggle is forced into being Sarah's guide again with all the grumbling reluctance that makes him lovable). What's Jareth up to? Who knows?

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Nine_

* * *

My father used to say there are only two things you should do in the world. One, the things that you want to do. Two, the things that you have to do. If they're the same, so much the better. If they're not, well, hold on to  _why_ the thing is necessary.

So, even though I had little love for the Labyrinth and wished more than anything to get home and be with Dad, I held on to the necessity; if I did not succeed, Toby would be eaten by a snake. That would be a bit too much for Dad to handle right then.

"Where is my brother?" I demanded. The goblin outside my door was a hideous creature, its skin disease-green and bubbling with black boils. It jumped in fright and its helmet visor clanged down on its nose, hiding milky eyes.

"I need to talk to the King," the goblin quavered. It went motionless, leaning on its halberd. A long second passed, and another. The goblin flicked up the visor and wailed, "He's not answering!"

"No, no, calm down," I said, waving my hands without touching it. I had the idea that touching its putrid flesh would give me the same condition. "We don't need Jareth. We can find him ourselves. Where do you think Toby is?"

"He's in the King's bedchambers!"

Oh. That would make things awkward. "And where are those?"

"Down the hall."

"All right, show me the way."

"No!" The goblin had a croaky voice that grated at my ears, and the more hysterical it got the higher and more painful its voice became. "The King wouldn't like that at all. Never!"

"Well if the King's not answering you, then he isn't watching us, is he? Then he won't know what we're doing and we won't get in trouble." This could be wrong. Jareth was just as likely spying on us through one of those crystal balls and not approaching for whatever reason. I hoped the goblin wasn't smart enough to think of it.

 _You could disappear yourself again._ The thought came and went in an instant, stamped out by a trauma-driven reflex.

"I – I –" the little goblin puzzled over this and I declared, "Right! Let's go!" and the goblin was compelled to stomp down the corridor and turn the corner. I smiled – more a gritting of the teeth than anything resembling joy – and chased after the clanking creature.

I could not throw the feeling that the corridor was transforming itself. The vague recollection I had of the journey here with Jareth included dust and bland stone and emptiness. Now there were more tapestries depicting fairy tales, both famous and obscure, and the left-hand wall was punched out with archways leading into a quiet inner courtyard, complete with burbling fountain and stone benches. The goblin sent it an uneasy look and hurried on.

We turned right and I still couldn't shake the sense of sudden and complete change in the air. The unlit chandeliers made from finely spun crystal had not existed until I stepped into view. Nor had the unglazed windows looking over the city – which was cleaner and neater than I remembered from my sighting of it on the hill. Everything felt freshly scrubbed and polished. With every step, the flagstones rang out louder and lightened in colour until they were marble shot through with gold and I could not pinpoint the moment when the change was complete.

"We're here," said the goblin. I pulled up short. It stamped the shining halberd on the marble and stood to attention. Its boils were gone and its skin looked healthier, the warm green of sunlight through thin leaves. Its eyes were clearer too. As the milky scum drained away, the irises revealed amber and emerald. It was almost cute.

Before us were a huge set of double doors, embossed in crowns and an odd shape that I recognised as Jareth's heavy necklace. It had the same symbol fixed in the centre as on my ring. With a great deal of trepidation, I cracked open the door and slipped through. The goblin stayed behind.

"Toby," I whispered, "Toby?"

Things shifted in the darkness and I squinted. Again, the room rearranged itself. Then gentle sunshine streamed in through a skylight, taking its time, like twisting the dimmer switch on a lightbulb. It illuminated a large and airy room. Its layout was almost the exact same as my own. The difference lay in the colour scheme – whites and greys and copper and black – and my ring's emblem replaced the roses. At the foot of the bed – if it could be considered to have a foot, being circular – was a beautiful wooden crib, made of thin, expertly whittled wood that twisted and twined so it appeared to be made of live branches, a bush grown into a cradle and stripped of leaves.

I tiptoed forwards and peered into the cot and saw my baby brother clothed in red and white stripes. I sighed in relief and reached down to stroke his cheek. He cooed in his sleep. Seeing him peaceful and unharmed released part of the tangled knot of stress in my chest.

"It's going to be all right, Toby. I'm getting us out of here."

Figuring the King's bedroom to be as safe as any in the castle, I pressed a kiss to Toby's forehead and made my exit. Spending more time than necessary in Jareth's room did not seem wise. The idea of getting caught . . .

I closed the door as quiet as I could and turned on the goblin, who was now as pristine as a goblin could be, ears clean, eyes bright, skin clear. Its armour was almost blinding and on the centre of the breastplate was a circlet of flowers. I frowned at that.

"Who would know how to find the King?" I asked.

The goblin thought and thought and frowned its bushy eyebrows. "Hoggle?"

"The dwarf from the gate?"

The goblin nodded quickly. "We can go to him there."

"Lead the way."

As we passed through the halls of the castle, something tickled at the back of my mind. Something about the gate, or the starting point . . .

"Here we are!" The goblin kicked at a slab of wall and it swung upwards, a reversed drawbridge. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get through. The moment my feet were clear, the wall slammed back into place. It was the glittering wall of the outermost section of the Labyrinth, stretching in either direction as far as the eye could see. I was back in the starting place, where the reeds and weeds had retreated, and the stones were swept, and the reflecting pool reflected the yellow-green sky without lily pad or algae.

Beyond the portico, a scrubby plain of dead bushes had taken up the space to the horizon. As I stared and blinked, flowers pushed through the dampening soil and created paths between jewel-green trees. It was something out of a fairy tale. I could imagine elves wandering in the cool depths of the woodlands and finding fairy circles in glades. Trickling streams would be followed to a deep, still lake in the centre, where deer and unicorns came to drink. The forest invited us to cross the portico and lose ourselves within.

"Ninety-two!"

Oh, right. Hoggle. That familiar face sculpted of hard leather stared at the goblin and I from the back of Hoggle's vest. My eyes were drawn up. Above him, a ring of roses had grown on the entrance to the Labyrinth; full, beautiful blush pink roses that swayed on the doors, reaching up to the golden sun. They were delicate and weak and I felt the same.

The mermaid was mistaken if she thought my will was strong. I was running on desperation and fear. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn't imagine ever beating the snake; it would eat me whole and I would do nothing more than scream.

A memory pierced through my fear and made it that much worse. The starting place.

The clock would begin again at the starting place.

"Oh no. Hoggle!"

The dwarf jumped and dropped its poisonous spray can. A fairy giggled and fluttered to freedom over our heads. "Oh! What you go and do that for?" he exclaimed.

"What happens when I save Toby?"

"You go home. What'd you think would happen?"

" _Oh_ ," I whined, "But I  _can't_. I have to save the Labyrinth."

"Save it? Save it from what?"

"Where's the King? We need his help."

"What for? I don't need to help you." He snatched up the spray and made to hobble off, but the goblin jabbed its halberd at the dwarf's chest. Hoggle stumbled, mouth falling open. "Hey, there's no need for that."

I stalked forwards and bent down to look him in the eye, taking care not to stab myself on the spearpoint. "There is a snake coming to eat us and I've only got thirteen hours to stop it and find my brother and you  _will_ help us."

"A snake? What are you talking about?"

"It's from the shadow realm. It wants revenge on me because I'm Speaker, I think, and I think it might eat the Labyrinth to do it."

"Eat the . . ." His eyes widened. " _Oh_ , no, no, you're talking about that Apep, aren't you?"

"You know it?"

"'Course I know it! Who doesn't? You're saying it's here?"

"Yes." The gobbling nearly dropped its weapon. I nudged it out of the way, lest it put out Hoggle's eye by mistake. "It escaped the shadow realm somehow. A door opened or something and it got through."

Hoggle went quiet, sliding the ball of his right boot on the ground. The fairy spray shook in his hands. During the conversation, the thinnest fuzz of black stubble had bloomed on his cheek and some of the pockmarks were fading.

"Hoggle," I said slowly, "What did you do?"

"Nothing . . ."

"Please, Hoggle, tell the truth."

"I just opened a door, is all." His deep, rough voice took on a keening quality, like a child trying to plead its case when it knows it's done wrong. "I've been in that oubliette hundreds of times and nothing's ever happened when I opened the door before."

"What happened?"

"I don't need to tell you nothing. You're not the King."

"Oh yeah?" I stuck out my hand, shoving the ring under his nose. His eyes widened.

"Wha'? How'd you get that?"

"Jareth's mother gave it to me. She said it's my job to protect the Labyrinth and you're going to help me! Now tell me what happened!"

Grumbling, Hoggle explained the door not shutting properly and going through to the coronation room. It felt so long ago that I had been in there myself I could barely remember it, except for the sensation of slithering above the pillars. It sent a shiver down my spine at the thought of the snake hiding up there, waiting to consume.

_I hate snakes._

"Oh, what to do, what to do." Toby, Jareth, the snake and less than thirteen hours to do it. Follow the ring, the mermaid said. I held up the ring and it caught the light of the sun. When I swung my hand towards the Labyrinth, it warmed a smidgen. "I suppose . . . Hoggle, can you find Jareth for us? Tell him to meet us at the coronation room."

"And  _how_  am I meant to find Jareth?"

"Where is he?"

"Probably the southern region since it changed."

"There you go. Please, Hoggle. The whole of the Labyrinth is in peril."

Hoggle opened his mouth to protest, glanced at the ring, at the roses, and grumbled under his breath. "Fine! Fine, horrible place, this is, never liked it, but it ain't like I can go anywhere else . . ." he kept grumbling as he kicked another piece of wall open and stomped through. The last I saw of him was that distorted leather face, whose mouth appeared to be smiling.

The goblin tapped my elbow. "Is the Labyrinth really in peril?"

"I'm afraid so." I knelt and held out my hand, feeling ridiculous but obligated. "I'm Sarah."

The goblin placed its tiny, chainmail paw in my palm. "Sturgie."

"If you don't mind me asking, are you a boy or a girl?"

"I'm a girl." It sounded more like a girl too, sweeter and easier on the ears.

I smiled as best I could manage and said, "Well, Sturgie, we're going to the coronation room. Think you can get us there?"

"That's easy. It's this way." Sturgie the girl goblin trotted off and shoved open the way into the maze. I lingered, rubbing my face with my hands, trying not to cry.

_I don't want to do this. I really don't want to do this._

"This way, Miss Sarah!"

Deep breath. Straighten your shoulders, Sarah. You're a Williams. You can do this.

In we go.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: I like Sturgie. I could have chosen Ludo or Sir Didymus to be Sarah's room guard but it wasn't feasible, you know? So I made up Sturgie. (Poor, poor Sturgie.)
> 
> Did you know that Sarah Jessica Parker was considered for the role of Sarah? And Michael Jackson for Jareth? Let's just say it would have been a very different film if that happened. Thank the Lord for David Bowie.
> 
> Until next time and thank you everyone who favourites, follows, and reviews this story. Honestly, I love and adore each and every one of you. We might be few but it's fun having people along for the ride :D
> 
> God Bless!


	10. As The World Falls Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jareth's brief moment of fun is interrupted, he learns about the threat to his Labyrinth, and he has to deal with an uppity Speaker. Dude can't catch a break.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Ten_

* * *

This was the most fun Jareth had had in years – centuries, even. For the first time as King, he didn't care one whit about the Labyrinth. The baby was asleep, the girl was for all intents and purposes a vegetable, and his goblins were so brainless he needn't worry. Life was sweet, easy, and a beautiful woman danced in his arms and acted as though he had painted the heavens for her. The longer she looked at him like that, the harder it was to believe he hadn't.

The dancers stepped and swished and spun across the marble, circles within circles, weaving in and out of each other. He and Linda moved within the centre, untouched by the others. He sang to her without pause. She shimmered in gold, the brightest star in their universe.

As time went by, her eyes lightened into yellow and her nose took on a flattened aspect.

He ignored this. Jareth – as with monarchs in general – was good at ignoring things.

What he couldn't ignore was a set of doors materialising in the mirrored wall and crashing open. Cracks split the mirrors and with a shatter and snap, they burst into stardust and the ballroom fell to nothing.

* * *

I stumbled, almost tripping, and used Sturgie's halberd to steady myself.

"Are you all right?"

"I think . . . I don't know." The shaking fear was back, same as in the forest. And my mind felt emptied, but of what I could not put my finger on. "Something weird happened, is all. Let's keep going."

"Miss . . . how are we going to defeat the snake?"

"Well, the mermaid said I have power of my own. I'm a Speaker, after all. I can wish things into happening. But she also said I can't use wishes against the snake because it's too powerful."

"Could you wish up a destiny sword? Or a champion to fight it in your place?"

"Maybe Jareth will have some ideas."

"Not far now, Miss. We're almost there. Let's hope the King comes soon."

* * *

"Hoggle!" Jareth roared. The King stormed through the sparkling remains of Sarah's deepest fears and grabbed the dwarf by the vest. "What are you doing here?"

"The girl sent me! Something about a snake and it eating the Labyrinth and a ring and your mother and a right mess she's made of the southern region –"

"Quiet."

Hoggle shut up. He tried to shrink into a space smaller than himself and found that with a head quite that large, it was quite impossible. He settled for studying the ground and imagining he wasn't held captive by his irascible King.

Linda and the other guests had dissolved with the mirrors. Hoggle and Jareth were alone in a tunnel of some kind, warm and dark and twice as big as Jareth remembered the snake being. Underfoot, the mirrored floor fractured and was overwhelmed by shifting hard-packed dirt and Jareth had to step onto a broken plaster bust to avoid being pulled under like quicksand. Remnants of Sarah's theatre warren hung as broken chandeliers and ragged velvet curtains being sucked into the shifting earth. The chandeliers' light faded more each moment. Jareth produced a glowing crystal ball. The air was close here, weighing upon them. The entire mass of the Underground seemed to press down from above.

"It's gotten worse," Hoggle had to say. "When I came through before it was mostly building." He didn't mind the change, really. It was almost like home in Mount Korrigan.

"A snake, you said," Jareth murmured.

"Yes, milord. She thinks its Apep."

"Who let it in?"

Hoggle hung his head, humming and hawing, and Jareth clicked his tongue and released the dwarf. Sarah's fears had changed again, which made Hoggle's story more likely. People didn't dread that which was mere hearsay, at least not enough for it to become their innermost terror. And he'd mentioned a ring, and his mother . . . No, it couldn't be.  _Calm, Jareth._

What to do? Find the girl, he supposed. And kick the blasted creature from his realm. Frustration of rule aside, the Labyrinth was still his domain and he'd be damned to let a slithering shadow monster take over while his back was turned.

"Sir . . . The Labyrinth is changing."

"I am not blind, Hoggle."

"It's changing because of  _her_."

"What?" he hissed, whirling on the dwarf.

"The northern region has become some sort of fairy forest. And the houses are clean and made of wood."

"Wood." Jareth flung the crystal ball onto the last shard of mirror at their feet and they vanished in an explosion of light and glitter to reappear outside the coronation room entrance in the outer Labyrinth.

Sarah screamed.

The goblin screamed.

Jareth spied the ring and hissed, "Who gave this to you?"

Sarah glared back. "You mother!"

"You do not know what you are messing with. Go save your brother and leave."

"That's what I'm trying to do, except your mom told me to save your kingdom." She held up her left hand. The symbol of the Labyrinth glinted at the King, mocking him for his curse. The lack of logs and cleanliness of the maze corridor laughed with it, along with the flowers budding in the cracks at the edges of the wall.

His own kingdom was punishing him for . . . for what? For trying to be King to a broken kingdom? It was his father's fault, not his! Why must he keep paying for it?

Why was that goblin almost pretty?

"You, who are you?" he demanded.

"Sturgie, your Majesty. You put me on guard duty outside Miss Sarah's room." Her gaze was intelligent and she bowed with perfect respect, and Jareth felt the last nail in his coffin.

He held out his hand, fingers slightly bent, the claws of a bear trap waiting to stab. "Hand the ring over to me."  _It is_ my  _crown. I have suffered for too long for it to be stolen like this._

"No."

"No?"

Sarah shook her head and her expression said she couldn't believe herself for doing it. "That snake will eat Toby too if we don't get rid of it and this ring will lead me to it."

"We? You think you have the power to defeat Apep, the serpent of chaos, the enemy to order? If this snake is indeed Apep, then it wants to eat all of creation. How will you stop it?"

"I don't know but I'm going to try. Come on, Sturgie, we're almost there." She and the goblin – the little traitor – set off again, Sarah's gold cloak swishing with every step. The Labyrinth must have given it to her. Jareth glared at the sky and thought,  _Mother, how could you?_ The sky was blue, with puffball clouds. A cooling breeze swept along the maze and ruffled his hair and brought with it the scent of wildflowers and pine trees.

He reappeared at Sarah's side, leaving Hoggle to shout and run to catch up. "Sarah," he crooned. "The clock has started. Can't you feel it? You are running out of time. Give me the ring and I will find the snake while you save your brother. Or else he will become one of us."

Sarah glanced at him, then at Sturgie in front, balled her hands into fists and strode on. He sighed. "Princess, you are going to your death."

"It's just a snake," she muttered. "How hard can it be to kill a snake? My aunt cut off one's head with a shovel."

"Tick tock, Sarah. You have seven hours left."

She nearly tripped and stopped. "What? It can't have been that long. That's not fair!"

"Nothing is, Princess. That's life. Give me the ring and all this goes away." He held is hand out again, smiling, imploring.

"What's so important about this ring, anyway? All it does is show where the snake is, right?"

"Oh! It marks you as the rightful successor to the throne of the Labyrinth!" Sturgie piped up and Jareth could have killed her but that would not endear him to Sarah. Sarah, shocked, rubbed the ring as if it might burn her.

"But . . . why did your mother give it to me? I'm mortal."

Jareth scoffed and strode off towards the coronation room entrance. Sarah hurried after him. "Jareth? Why did she give it to me? She said something about healing the Labyrinth, but I didn't know what she meant."

_"_ _Here, my darling. The Labyrinth senses his end is soon. Take it. It's your rightful place."_

_Only his end hadn't been soon, had it, Mother? And you've done it again_. How long until the earthquakes and storms? Either she gave up the ring or he, unthinkably, stepped aside.  _Healing the Labyrinth._ His own kingdom was subverting him.

He finally understood his old man.

"Do not ask me what goes on in that siren's mind. Here. Let's go kill your snake." He clicked his fingers and his clothes transformed into the black leather and high-collared cloak of his battle armour. A blank section of stonework waited. The flowers at its base waved back and forth in the breeze.

"Are you ready, Sarah?"

Clad in silk and lace, she appeared ready for a bed.

The burning light in her eyes, however, told a different story.

"Open it."

* * *

Sturgie entered first, then Jareth, Sarah, with Hoggle reluctantly bringing up the rear. Jareth swore in an ancient tongue lost to the Aboveground. Sarah copied his sentiments in a modern fashion.

The coronation room was gone again. They stood in a tunnel heading in either direction that could have been the same one as in the southern region. Curiously, Sarah's eyes shot upwards to the ceiling and she relaxed when she saw nothing but black and trickles of falling dirt.

Jareth created a light orb for each of them in different colours; red for Hoggle, green for Sturgie, silver for himself, and pink for Sarah. When he placed it in her hand, it turned gold. He rolled his eyes.

"What now?" asked Hoggle.

"We find the snake," said Sturgie with practical simplicity. "And we kill it."

"But where is it?"

"Sarah," said Jareth. He gestured and she, inhaling deep, stepped forward and swung her hand in either direction.

"Left."

"After you."

She glared, motioned at Sturgie, and the two struck out together.

As much as walking along the tunnels of an ancient snake was invigorating in its own way, Jareth grew bored within a few minutes. He started singing the tune as he'd made for Linda, lilting through the passages and enjoying the tightening of Sarah's shadowed shoulders with every word.

" _As the world falls down –_ "

"Shut up!" she snapped over her shoulder.

"Are you scared, Sarah? If you gave the ring to me, you need not concern yourself with any of this."

"Aren't you scared?" she retorted. "This is the snake that eats worlds and we don't know how to stop it."

"Oh, Sarah, you don't know what my powers are."

"What are they, then?"

"You'll see."

She groaned and picked up her pace. Sturgie, in an act of cunning that took him by surprise, slowed and allowed her King to take her spot beside the Speaker. He grinned and slipped over the undulating earth to her shoulder.

At that moment she whispered, "I wish I had a drink of water," and a goblet was in her hand. She sculled it and asked for another and sculled that too. Done, she said, "I wish the goblet to go to someone who needs it," and it disappeared. She paid him no attention.

That show of power shook Jareth more than he could say. Never in his reign, or his father's before him, had a Speaker known of their power as a Speaker. Nor had a Speaker ever made it to the shadow realm, much less escaped with their life. No Speaker had met his mother, and certainly no Speaker had been granted the ring of ascension by her.

Perhaps she could defeat the snake. If she did . . .

What choice did he have? He'd step aside and allow Sarah Williams to cleanse the Labyrinth and save his people.

Underground monarchs who lost power over their kingdom tended to fade into legend. For that to happen, they tended to die too. That was all right, he told himself. He wasn't anything if he wasn't the Goblin King.

Sarah sniffed and rubbed her eyes with her free hand. The toe of her shoe hit a protruding root and she stumbled. He caught her by the shoulder, holding her until she was steady.

"Thanks," she muttered. "Where are we?"

Roots, lit in a sphere of red and gold and green and silver, dangled from above and stuck up from below, thin, spindly, with dozens of worm-like offshoots to brush against the face and trail dirt into the hair. Jareth frowned, waved a hand, and the roots moved aside and buried themselves into the walls. He still had some power, then. "Under the Fiery Forest."

"Your mom said the snake's will was strong. Do you think the Labyrinth has started creating these tunnels for it?"

Ah, here was an option he hadn't considered; the snake becoming ruler of the Labyrinth through sheer willpower.

"If so, we are in trouble."

Right. Kill the snake, let Sarah take the crown.

There was silence for a time, naught but breath and footsteps, clanking armour and jingling of jewels and Sarah and Jareth's cloaks rustling. The oppressive warmth and heaviness of the earth bore down and, between all four, the breathing became shallower, steps faster. None of them could see beyond the tiny multicoloured universe they walked in. The pitch-black air outside it shifted and poked at the universe and tried to get in. It wanted to trap, to terrify, to torment. Sarah kept her wide eyes fixed forward, following the curves and dips and rises, Jareth a half-step behind. Her globe cast weird radiance upon her face.

"We could work together, you know," whispered Sarah. "Combine wills to defeat it."

Jareth sent her a sidelong glance and said, scorn well-rooted, "You and I are at cross-purposes, Sarah. I have my doubts that collaboration will work between us."

"Cross-purposes? We both want the snake gone, don't we?"

"I am the Goblin King. You are a Speaker. I want you trapped in a dream of my design, never again to return home so that your brother may become part of my kingdom. You have been proclaimed my usurper and the Labyrinth would have you take my throne."

"Can't we, I don't know, not care about that for a while? Until we defeat the snake."

"It is what it is, Sarah." He gripped his cloak and pulled it free from a snagging tree root. With a glower, he swiped his hand through the air and the root fell in two. Sarah did not slow for him. He lengthened his stride and heard the jingling and clanking speed up behind him.

"Why do you even steal children? What's in it for you?" She sounded in earnest.

"Ask your ancestors who invented the role for the Goblin King. And look to yourself. You were the one who wished your brother away. It is a mercy that I provide a way to remedy your impulsiveness."

"I wish you wouldn't –"

Jareth slapped a hand over her mouth. "Careful, Sarah." Threat stained every syllable of his words. "A wish is no trifle here."

She yanked him by the wrist and tried to storm off as before, except the tunnel split in two. She used the ring, pointing at either black fork, and cried out.

"It's not working!"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: Yaaaas, Jareth and Sarah dynamics for the win! Honestly, I love these two together. Can't take my eyes off them when I watch the movie. It is ~perfect~ (Now imagine it being Sarah Jessica Parker and Michael Jackson. Hehehe. What.)
> 
> I kind of feel sorry for Jareth in this fic. I mean, he's trying his best to be the Goblin King in a Labyrinth that's falling apart around him and then this girl shows up and his mother chooses her over him. Dude is having a bad day.
> 
> Let me know what you thought (especially you, Guest 2019, can't wait to hear your thoughts), and I'll see you in a few days.
> 
> Later!


	11. Hello, I am: Your Worst Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The concept 'let's split up' is a stupid one, as Jareth is about to learn. Well, at least he has his magic rainbow sword.

_Light Without The Sunlight_

_Chapter Eleven_

* * *

"Fascinating. Perhaps the Labyrinth is rejecting you."

I shot him a glare sharp enough to cut. He smiled and beckoned for the ring again. I clenched my fist and said to Sturgie, "Where are we?"

"Oh? Is the would-be princess lost? What ruler cannot place herself within her kingdom?"

I kept my eyes on Sturgie – or the multi-coloured disco ball she'd become in the lights of the globes. The goblin hummed and tapped the dark sides of the tunnel with her halberd and the gold and green and red and silver danced upon the motley crew. "I think we're at the edge of the southern region."

"What's in that?"

"I don't know. It changes according to who rules the Labyrinth. It reflects their deepest fears. First it was that disease swamp, and then a . . ." She trailed off, looking at the King.

Hoggle spoke up for the first time since entering the tunnel. "It was the bog of eternal stench when you came. Disgusting place – don't want to know what's in your mind. Then it became some maze of theatres, and then the tunnels."

"The snake changed it to tunnels?" I said.

"Why would it do that?" Hoggle retorted. His beard had a curl to it now and his skin was clearer, his face less swollen. "It's a snake, it likes tunnels. More likely your fear of it made the tunnels in the first place."

Jareth laughed. "Congratulations, Sarah, you created the perfect habitat for it. Well done. Do you want a silver platter to put my kingdom on?"

 _Ignore him, ignore him,_ but I couldn't ignore him because the fear needed an outlet – lest I become paralysed by the thought of fangs flying through the air at my throat – and I snapped, "Your kingdom? If it's your kingdom then why did your mother give me the ring? Why has the Labyrinth changed for me? When I met Sturgie she was almost diseased, and now she's good as new and it wasn't you that did that. You don't care about this place or your subjects or anything. No wonder it doesn't want you as its king anymore."

_Oh no. What was I thinking? After what his mother told me, too. This is his father's fault. You're an idiot, Sarah._

He was a foot from me and yet I felt him looming and surrounding and trapping me as well as the tunnel did.

_I want to go home._

"This is my kingdom," said Jareth, velvet-quiet, his voice almost swallowed by the earth. "You, Sarah Williams, are a guest here, brought by your own foolishness. Any freedom you experience is bestowed by my hand and I can take it away just as easily. It was I who kept you brother safe while you made a stupid wish. It was I who saved you from the shadow realm. It was I who stopped the clock. Do not think your newfound power has elevated you to my level. I have been alive for two thousand years. I am still the Goblin King and you would do well not to forget it."

I swallowed and nodded. One green eye, one brown, flashed and glittered and reminded me that this man was not human.

"Do you think the griffin knows how to kill the snake?" I asked, almost unable to get the words out.

"Would you like to ask him?"

"How?"

"Throw your globe at a surface and step through. Keep the ring on. It will protect both of you from becoming one of them. To get back merely wish for it."

"Sturgie, come on." I didn't even say goodbye to Hoggle – who, in my periphery, stood straighter than ever – in my haste to escape. The shifting grey void welcomed the little goblin and I with open arms.

On the other side I let out a sob and crumpled to my knees. Heather and dry grass rustled and flattened beneath me and a wind whistled through my hair. Wherever we were was dark and vast and misty and I could barely see it through the tears.

"It's impossible," I moaned. "It's all my fault, everything's gone wrong."

"There, there, Miss." A chainmail paw patted me on the shoulder. "King Jareth will sort it right."

"He shouldn't have to. Toby's going to turn into a goblin now." I might get stuck here, too, and Dad would have no one but Karen.

"It's not so bad being a goblin." Out the corner of my eye, a tiny row of sharp teeth bared themselves, lit in green. "I enjoy it."

"Were you always a goblin?"

"'Course not. None of us were to start with. But King Jareth's castle is what we remember."

I rubbed the tears from my eyes and asked, "Do you even like it there? Is he a good king?"

"Better than the last one, I tell you what, and he deals with the sickness as best he can. We can't have visitors much in case it spreads, but he sings songs with us and we get to join in. We have fun." She sighed and leaned on her halberd and held up the green globe in wonder. "And he's pretty too."

"Sturgie!"

"Can't deny it, Miss. I was human once back when the old king was in power and my brother didn't want me no more. I still got eyes for them human-like people. Goblin boys . . . Children, the lot of 'em." She shook her head. I laughed, wetly, and coughed on the thick saliva built up by crying. Pushing back my hair, I looked around.

"This looks like Dartmoor. Mum and Dad brought me here once, a few years ago." Thick fog lingered, cut through with moving shafts of moonlight. Within was the suggestion of rolling hills and bogs and rock outcroppings and hidden streams. The smell of dirt and peat lay heavy on the tongue. I breathed it in and remembered, "That was the year that she . . . Anyway, no time for that now. Let's find the griffin." I got to my feet with Sturgie's help and tried to bat out the dirt and damp from the silk gown. It didn't work. Ah well. Bigger fish to fry.

"I wish to know where the griffin is," I said and clapped my hands once – the sharp  _smack_ was smothered by the coiling clouds of vapor the instant it sounded. It did its job. A tiny blue light flickered into life, bouncing and swaying three feet above the ground. Sturgie picked her way over the unsteady ground and jabbed her spear at the nearest. It was a bulbous, wispy thing, and it vanished at the halberd's touch and reappeared a little further across the moorland.

"Will o' wisp," I gasped. "Oh, it'll show us the way." I took Sturgie by the hand and together we followed the wisp to the griffin.

* * *

The grey haze imploded, and Sarah Williams was gone. "Come, Hodgepodge. We will deal with the snake ourselves."

"Uh, your Majesty, shouldn't I check on the baby, or maybe tend to the gardens? The gate needs watching, after all, and . . ." Jareth's flapping cape was almost out of sight down the righthand tunnel. Hoggle sighed, tugged his trousers higher, and hustled.

His King was on a mission. This was good. Of late, Jareth rarely had reason to do any more than sing and flap around as an owl. That he had a goal, a reason to  _be_ the Goblin King at last – well, Hoggle hoped he would finally do something about the curse.

"Sire," Hoggle began. "What are you going to do about the snake?"

"Kill it."

"Ah . . . Uh, how?"

Jareth whirled around and Hoggle saw nails turning to talons and hair more feathery than usual. "You doubt your King, Hogwash?"

"It's Hoggle," he mumbled.

"I have ruled this dreadful place for two millennia and this is the thanks I get? Uppity Speakers and faithless subjects and a damned snake trying to destroy everything I worked so hard to protect?"

Hoggle snorted.

"What was that?"

Hoggle had never noticed how haunting owl eyes could be when lit by silver and red. He noticed now. He gulped down his insubordination.

"I never doubted you, Your Majesty."

"I see," Jareth drawled. "Your confidence is inspiring." He snapped into motion without warning and Hoggle jogged after and wished he'd never come to the Labyrinth kingdom. Curse his curiosity over the great parties the old king had been said the throw, and curse Jareth for closing the ways. Jareth was a spoilt brat of a monarch who terrified Hoggle.

That Sarah girl might be the ticket. Maybe, just maybe, when they found the snake, he could push Jareth towards its open mouth and run for it. Then Sarah could kill the snake, be crowned ruler, and he wouldn't have to put up with being called Hogwash and get back to being himself.

Except he'd swapped curiosity for cowardice since coming here, and was Jareth scary.

He sighed and trotted along, stumbling here and there, and wishing he was somewhere else.

* * *

Damn his mother. And damn himself for introducing Sarah to her. Why had he done it? Some form of subconscious self-destruction manifesting itself? He'd though it circumstance but now he wasn't so sure.

Jareth wasn't one for wars and glorious battle. However, at that moment, he was looking forward to a killing.

Apep . . . no matter what he'd said to Sarah, he doubted it was that particular snake. True, the chaos serpent had disappeared in history long past, but the snake of the shadow realm was not the right size to be the awesome beast of legend. This creature that haunted the tunnels was probably a Naga of some kind, one of the minor serpent deities of the Above's Orient. Hopefully. The other option was that it  _was_ Apep, the eater of worlds who had tyrannised the Underground since its inception, and who was thought to be banished by one of the other monarchs.

Or maybe this was the  _other_  snake, the deceiver, the liar and destroyer and killer and thief. The one who, so tale has it, fell and caused the fall of Man and has been working to keep them beaten down and ignorant of their true misery ever since. He once heard it said that the greatest trick of the snake was to convince the world that it didn't exist.

If it was  _that_ snake, the Labyrinth was in even deeper trouble.

But, again, he doubted it. Apep or the lying serpent wouldn't have wished themselves into non-existence where they would be trapped in the shadow realm 'til death. No, this was to be one of the other Speaker creations.

Jareth stretched the fingers of his right hand, flicked his wrist, and felt the comforting grip of his cane, it's rounded silver top resting in his palm.

He tossed it a foot in the air and snatched the sword that fell. He swung it overhead and heard Hoggle's intake of breath. The tip of the sword drew a dazzling rainbow of the purest colour that hung for a long second in the tunnel before fading away. Celtic knots trailed down the polished flat of the blade and wrapped over the handguard as intricate leather detailing. The butt of the grip was stamped with the Labyrinth emblem in bronze.

"Do you think a sword created to level mountains and destroy armies will be good enough for a lowly snake, Hogor?"

Hoggle gulped. "If you say, Sire."

"It's a good thing I do say, then, isn't it? This way." Jareth led the way through the righthand of another fork and then left, all the while flicking the sword through the air, testing the balance, reacquainting himself. It greeted him as an old friend, moulding into his grip as if it had never been used by another.

The tunnels changed composition – the roots receded and embedded scraps of cloth fluttered as they passed. The air seemed thinner, drier, hotter. It rasped down Jareth's throat. Soon enough every breath was painful, and Jareth thanked his magic that, despite the black leather, he would not overheat.

Hoggle, on the other hand, panted and stumbled along. There was a dull thump and a shout and a thud. The dwarf groaned and got to his feet. "Oh, stupid place!" and he kicked the thing he'd tripped over and gasped in pain. As he hopped around, Jareth examined the stonework protruding from the floor. It was the cap of a column, all curlicued and clean. They were well within the southern region then.

Jareth tapped his amulet. Damn thing, why did it not work? It should be heating up in accordance with threats to the Labyrinth. He had felt it before, not long ago, then Linda . . .

Ah. He'd thought it was Sarah, and the snake had taken advantage of the malleability of the southern region to keep him from investigating. How cunning.

He took a left and stalked forward and then stopped.

Where was he going?

"Hoggle?" he said.

"Yes, your Majesty?"

"Do you know where to find the snake?"

"No, your Majesty."

Jareth hastened. There was another fork further up. He went right. Another fork. He tried going left. He paused, thought back over the journey. Left, right, left, right . . .

How long had they been in these tunnels for?

He cocked his head to the side, concentrating. Sarah's clock said two hours left. They'd been down here for nearly five hours.

_This is absurd._

Jareth materialized at the edge of the southern region.

Except he didn't.

He was still in the tunnel. He tried again, seeking the throne room, and stayed where he was.

He looked at Hoggle, who was looking at his red globe. The light from within was dwindling, a mere pinprick within the crystal. His silver globe was much the same.

Jareth slashed at the air and the rainbow swept in its usual arc. It wasn't all magic, then, just his. He wondered if he'd used the last dregs of his powers to summon the weapon. He couldn't tell. His chest, his head, his whole being, felt numb and insubstantial. His thoughts were indistinct. A wash of pointlessness, of nothingness, washed upon him and he stood unmoving, caught by the onslaught of  _why?_

"Sire," said Hoggle. "Your Majesty . . ." The dwarf's voice trailed off and he sat upon the ground. Frozen. Easy prey.

Jareth forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, stumping onwards. He swished the sword half-heartedly through the air to create light to see by. Step, step, step, step. On and on. Why was he doing this again? To save his Labyrinth, wasn't it? But the Labyrinth didn't want him . . .

He at last came out of the tunnel, into a space vaster than he could see. He felt the emptiness stretching out in front, and above. A swish of the sword highlighted a few pillars of earth rising into a void and a hole in the ground directly ahead. Other than that, it was dark, darker than pitch. The blackness seeped into his eyes and into his brain and left him dumb.

"At last, the King arrives."

The snake was here. The sliding of scales echoed through the chamber, sifting through the columns and finding Jareth's ears, where it insinuated itself and dragged ice up and down his spine. He could not see it, could not pinpoint it. He could not do a thing. The sword hung at his side. It could have been as heavy as the universe for all that he could move it.

"I have been waiting . . . hoping you would come . . . Your Labyrinth has been most . . .  _gracious_." The sibilance of it made Jareth want to retch, if he'd been able.

"I must thank your father, too . . . Your petty squabbles created the path in the coronation room . . . Just enough space to get a little piece of myself through . . . His madness was my strength . . . It was too bad when he died . . . I had almost got through . . . but I left a piece of myself behind . . . waiting . . . perpetuating chaos . . . feeding on your health . . ."

Its voice was behind him, above him, below, slipping in and out.

Jareth couldn't breathe.

" _Yes_  . . . it was me that cursed your kingdom . . . I watched it crumble . . . I kept it weak . . . so that when I returned, I could eat you all so, so easily . . . Like mice . . .

"And that girl, that delicious, dreadful girl . . . she made the path whole once more . . . and your dwarf in the tunnel, who I shall eat after you, opened the door . . . and I could come through . . . Once I've eaten you, I will take the strength of this place . . .

"I will no longer be trapped in the shadow realm . . . I will eat the Underground and take your power . . . Then I will go Above . . . The Speakers will die . . . I shall  _consume_   _all_. . ."

Jareth had just enough control to whisper, "Apep."

The snake's head rose from the tunnel set into the floor. It was larger, far larger than Jareth remembered. It was thick as an ancient oak. Its yellow eyes lit up, intoxicated with hunger and rage. Hot, dry air came off it in waves and Jareth's mouth dried into a desert.

"Yes, Goblin King." Apep' mouth split open. Its teeth dripped luminous green venom. ". . . Thank you for your years of service . . . your subjects have been delicious . . . But I know you will taste the sweetest of all . . ."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: Oh, my Lord, what is going to happen!? *GASP* Jareth is in the clutches of the snake without his powers and Sarah and Sturgie are far away from being able to help! Oh no! And finally we learn why the heck Apep, eater of worlds, has decided to target the Labyrinth - all because of Jareth's dad. Dude, the old king was not a great guy.
> 
> Until next time on, Life Without The Sunlight!
> 
> Peace out and God Bless.


	12. Tale As Old As Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You have power of your own," said the griffin. "You are a speaker. Speak."

_Light Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Twelve_

* * *

"Thank you!" I called to the wisp, and Sturgie and I jumped over the stream and appeared on the valley floor.

"Wow," said Sturgie. The high sky and the craggy rock faces covered in creatures were as impressive as ever.

I ignored all of it and strode over to the now-familiar rock, stood upon it, and shouted to the air, " _How do I kill the snake!?_ "

Three dozen of the winged beasts closest took to the air and squawked and roared and spiralled up into the moon's face and over the clifftops. One of them remained. It dived down to land upon the ground before the rock in a cloud of dust and shuffling of feathers. I bowed my head to the griffin. It bowed back.

"Apep has entered your land," it declared.

"So, it is Apep. How do I kill it?"

"The mermaid told you. You have power of your own."

"But what power?"

"You are a Speaker.  _Speak._ "

"She said I couldn't wish it away!"

"I did not say wish." The griffin launched itself up. My mouth dropped open.

"Hey! Hey, what does that mean?" Too late. It copied its fellows and went over the clifftops and out of sight. Sturgie and I were alone on the valley floor. I huffed in frustration and crossed my arms. "Well,  _that_ was pointless. We crossed the whole moor for nothing. Why doesn't anyone give a straight answer around here?"

"Miss Sarah," Sturgie gasped. I looked over. Her crystal ball of green light was dimming quickly. The gold one was much the same. "Quick, Miss, take us back. We must help the King!"

"But how? How can I speak it away? That thing tried to eat me alive, it's not going to leave the Labyrinth because I tell it off!"

"You're a Speaker. It means a lot more than just saying words."

I wanted to rip my hair out. "I need help!"

"Then get it!" Sturgie snapped.

"Fine! Cat, dog, come here!" The cat and the dog appeared on either side of the goblin. Sturgie squealed and backed up, almost tripping over her halberd.

The dog lay down and placed its head on its paws. The cat flicked its tail.

"Yes?" growled the cat.

"How do I kill the snake?"

"I am no Speaker," it said. "You must do it your own way. Good luck." It turned and bounded off. In a second it was swallowed up by a shadow realm path.

"Will everyone abandon me?" I murmured. My tattered hem fluttered about my ankles and I hugged myself, suddenly chilled. The enormity of my task was falling upon my shoulders.

The dog got to its feet, dipped its heavy head. "We cannot help you. The snake is stronger than we are."

"But what do I  _do_? What do I say? Please, help me."

The dog huffed. It sounded as if it was laughing. "Your kind created us, and you would ask us to advise you?" It padded forwards, and I got a heady whiff of damp dog and forest. Two black, sad eyes gazed out from the hanks of green moss fur. "You are a Speaker. Your conviction in your stories created us. Tell a story."

I pursed my lips. Reaching up, I patted its head and got a handful of dog slobber in return.

"Thank you."

"Good luck, Speaker." The dog thumped off and went through a different path to the cat. Its dinner-plate paws were the last I saw of it, there on the moonlit valley floor.

_Tell a story._

"Miss!" The globes had gone out.

* * *

". . .  _Yes_ , Goblin King . . ."

Its voice was scarier than I remembered. My wish to be in a position to see the snake without being seen brought us to the mouth of the tunnel, where it met with an enormous cavern. I heard its hugeness by the echo of the snake's words, even though I could see nothing at all.

Sturgie hid behind me, frozen in place lest her armour make a sound. I cursed myself for not making her take it off before we came, but we were frantic.

". . . your subjects have been delicious . . . but I know you will taste the sweetest of all . . ."

I leaned around the side of the tunnel and . . . there it was. The snake, burning with that internal yellow fire and the horrid yellow eyes. A scream rose in my throat and I fought it down. Oh, I hated snakes. Why, why, why was this my job? I'd take looking after Toby forever to this. How could anyone expect me to defeat  _that_? The power of being a Speaker? Yeah, that was a fiction if I ever heard one. This needed an act of God.

Lit by those eyes, Jareth's face was dazed, as unlike him as I'd ever seen. He was paralysed, by fright or some other force I could not know.  _Move, Jareth. Do something!_

The snake's eyes moved and locked on me and I ducked back, banging into Sturgie. Her armour plates clashed together.

_Oh no._

". . . I smell you, girl . . ." Slithering echoed, that  _scratching at the back of your throat and make you sick_  slithering, and I screamed,

"Sturgie, run!" We pelted into nothingness, unable to see a thing. I fumbled towards the clanking, caught hold of her spear, and with one hand touching the wall I led us along the inner curve of the tunnel. The dry, heavy sound of something very large and very fast gained on us.

Suddenly, Sturgie tore free from my grasp. "No!" I stumbled and scrabbled back to her. "Sturgie!"

She groaned. "I tripped, Miss."

My foot connected with a solid object. I leaned down and felt moulded leather and a hunched back. "Hoggle?" If it was Hoggle, he didn't make a sound.

Burning yellow rounded the corner, eyes, scales, spines, and saw us. Its tongue flickered out, tasting the fear in the air, and it threw itself forward and its snub nose loomed up like a steam train.

I snatched at a stubby limb and dragged the short body onwards. Backlit by the yellow eyes, Sturgie hauled herself up and turned and . . . aimed the halberd.

"Sturgie, no!"

"Run, Miss!"

It must have grown a dozen-fold, it barely fit into the tunnel. The ring burned like a brand on my finger as I tugged the limp weight of Hoggle further, further. This tunnel would never end, Sturgie was to be crushed by the sheer force of the snake and I would be next.

"DIE!" Sturgie shouted. I glanced back and saw her tiny person in the shining armour raise the spear. The snake opened its maw. Its fangs were longer than the halberd, taller than her. She struck upwards and gored the roof of its mouth at the second the jaws snapped shut.

I screeched wordlessly and kept pulling, kept dragging, trying to find words and wishes but none would come. It was all white-hot panic.

Sturgie's sacrifice stopped the slithering and I burst out into the cavern. The tunnel had curved back into it.

"Ack!" Jareth and I went down in a heap and pain lanced across my left palm.

"Sarah?"

"Jareth, the snake, it's coming." Where was it? How could we possibly defeat it in the darkness where it had the upper hand?

"I wish we had light!" I shouted. The chamber filled with flickering orange. It came from the pieces of chandelier sticking out of the pillars and walls and I looked back to see the head of the snake emerge from the tunnel. I grabbed Jareth around the shoulders and rolled us over and over. The snake ripped past, tearing through my cloak and dress and grazing my back raw with its scales. Agony blazed. If that had been one of its spines, we'd have been cut in two.

It dove into the hole in the floor. I pushed Jareth and watched the stream of scales flow into the opening. The tail whipped past, and at the last second, I threw an arm over Jareth and pressed us into the dirt. A spine went whipping over us before plunging down.

We had quiet, for a moment at least, in which the snake's movements were rumblings in the walls like a distant earthquake. I groaned and rose to my hands and knees.

"Hoggle!"

In the shadow cast by one of the pillars, lay a small boulder. It moved. I struggled across the groove wrought by the snake, hissing at the burning of my back. "Hoggle, are you all right?"

Hoggle moaned. His eyelids fluttered, then closed. A trail in the earth connected him to the groove. He must have rolled out of the way as Jareth and I had. I slumped. If he'd died too, on top of Sturgie, I might have lost it entirely. Poor, poor Sturgie. If Mom's death hadn't punctured the lingering disbelief, then Sturgie's immediate and brutal end did.

The cavern could have fit three of the mermaid's caverns. It was clean and looked hewn by an unseen hand from orange clay and black earth and random segments of plaster. Tunnel mouths punctured the walls and ceiling and floor. The tracts of floor between the tunnels were the widths of narrow country roads and made of curious combinations of tiles and marble and dirt. At random places along these roads, pillars joined the roof and the ground, and also branched out and thrust into the walls to create a three-dimensional jungle gym for serpents. The chandelier shards, scattered as they were, created more shadow than light and weird shapes to taunt and confuse. There were still plenty of hiding places for the snake here.

After tugging Hoggle to what I hoped was relative safety at the base of a pillar made of a Greek column and moulded clay, I knelt beside the King. "Jareth," I said. "Are you okay?" My hand hovered over his chest, awkward, unsure. "Jareth, I need your help. Please, please, wake up."

His eyes snapped open. He shot up and my palm smacked into his amulet. I recoiled, clenching it into a fist against my leg.

He let out a moan of pain and hunched forward. Not knowing what to do, I touched his shoulder and waited.

"Where is it?" he hissed.

Rumbling came from somewhere deep below. "It's coming back soon. We've got to figure out a plan to stop it."

"The sword."

"What sword?"

"My sword, you foolish . . ." He looked around, then at my free hand which had bled a bloody palm print on my dress. I snatched it out of view. "Where is it?" He met my gaze for the first time. Desperation was written in his thin face. "What did you do with it?"

"It must have fallen in with the snake. What are we going to do?"

"The sword was the plan." He lay back, hair splayed out around him, arms flopping at his sides. "It's pointless now." I'd never heard such defeat in a person's voice. Without warning, I was angry.

"No. You don't get to give up! This is your Labyrinth and I can't do this without you!"

"It's your Labyrinth, Sarah. Yours and that snake's. It was never mine."

I leaned over him, both hands gripping his leather armour and wished I could shake sense into him. "Jareth,  _you're_  the Goblin King, not me. I don't want the throne. I just want my brother back." Tears welled up and splashed onto his chest, mixing with the blood of my palm. "I have to save him." I couldn't stop crying. I tipped forward and my forehead hit warm, breathing leather. The sobbing echoed around us as the snake's had, bouncing about, an entire chorus of weeping, terrified girls.

Long fingers stroked the back of my head. Mom used to do that when I was little and overwrought. She'd hold me tight and sing and recite Shakespeare's sonnets until I fell asleep. The tears fell thicker and faster.

The rumbling came closer. Dirt trickled from the roof and landed on my neck. "I can't do it," I whispered. "I can't."

Jareth brushed the dust away. "Isn't there some quote your lot made that says bravery is going on despite the fear? It sounds like something you'd dream up."

"Why  _me_?" I raised my head. "You told me to turn back. I should have listened to you."

Jareth sat up and forced me to sit up too. He spied the mess I'd made of his breastplate, lip curling in distaste. "I'd like to think, Sarah dear, that my mother was wise in choosing you as my successor. The Labyrinth recognises your strength of will, so why cannot you?"

"I'm fifteen!"

"Your point?"

I hissed through my teeth. The ring was hot again. I twisted around and, through wavering vision smeared in tears, saw the snake coiling around a pillar coming in from the ceiling. Hoggle's pillar. I found my strength.

"APEP!" I screeched, voice breaking on the syllables.

The snake stopped, its head rearing up and spying me. Blood spilt over its lipless mouth. Good job, Sturgie.

I stood, willing my knees to stop trembling and the sweat to stop pooling under my arms. My heart raced,  _lub-dup, lub-dup,_ so fast I thought I might faint.

". . . You know my name, Speaker . . ." It had grown since it ate Sturgie. Gorged on the little goblin's blood and bones. It remained too close to Hoggle for comfort but it did not attack.

"Yes, I know you."

Jareth's hand wrapped around my ankle and anchored me in place.

"Do you know what they called me?"

_Tell a story. Just like a bedtime story to Toby or one of your storybooks. I'm a Speaker, and I can create his epilogue._

"You were the world encircler."

"And I will be again."

The words trembled and stuttered but I managed to say them. "No, you won't."

Apep hissed and darted over to a closer pillar. It was fast, so, so fast. Jareth's grip tightened.

"What do you fear, Apep?"

"I fear nothing!"

"You do fear," I whispered, swallowed, shouted, "You do fear! You feared being trapped in the shadow realm!"  _Oh, give me the words._ "But you won't go there again. Apep, the great serpent, found strength in the shadow realm. He revelled in the chaos and he hunted the inhabitants." It came closer again. It hung above us, jumping from one pillar to the next to create a cage of itself, scales sliding over each other like a massive, living stream of lava that crept lower and lower. Fangs started to show and drip blood and venom into the holes and walkways, drops as large as my fist.

"Apep didn't fear the shadow realm. He knew what truly scared him."

Apep laughed in a ripple through his entire body. "Nothing scares me . . . I will consume everything . . . and what will there be to fear?"

I saw it. I gripped the ring but it had stuck itself to my seared skin. I covered it with my other hand.

"Because if he consumed the world, what then? There would be nothing left for him to eat, nothing to fear him or worship him. He'd be alone." The story rolled off my tongue and bounced around Apep's cage. "Apep had trapped himself again in a shadow realm, but this time there was nothing to hunt. There was nothing at all. Him, the strongest thing that existed, with nothing to use his strength against. And if  _he_ was the entire universe, then was there a universe at all? Did he even exist? Had he, in eating everything, consumed himself too?"

The snake lunged.

Lubricated by blood, I ripped the ring free and flung it into Apep's red mouth.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: Oh my goodness, we're almost at the end! One more chapter and the epilogue to go! This is so exciting *•* Thanks for sticking this out with me, everyone. Playing with Jareth and Sarah and the Labyrinth universe has been so much fun and even more so to be able to share it with you.
> 
> See you on Tuesday :)


	13. The Southern Region

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Had he, in eating everything, consumed himself too?"

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Thirteen_

* * *

The southern region blinked out of existence.

The Snake in the centre of this nothing universe writhed and rolled and twisted in and over itself and, urged by insatiable hunger, its fangs found its tail and it started to eat until there was nothing left.

The southern region returned, rather changed from its brief – and endless – absence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: Epilogue coming soon (I swear)


	14. The Bridge to the Labyrinth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "A fresh start, is it?" he said, touching his amulet.

_Life Without the Sunlight_

_Chapter Fourteen_

* * *

Jareth sat up and wondered if he'd slept. He was refreshed as he'd never felt before, calm, well. Then he wondered if he was still sleeping and thus the bridge that he stood on was part of a dream.

A small bridge, little long enough to cross a stream, poked out over a field of Labyrinth roses on wood stilts. Rippling blush pink blossoms went on past the horizon and, as with the other regions, met with no opposition to the east or west. Labyrinth roses were special in that they did not grow in tangled bushes as Aboveground. Here they were as wildflowers, single heavy heads in a nest of spiked leaves, bending to and fro. Instead of disease or bog stench or cigarettes, his kingdom smelled of spring. At his back was the clay wall of the Labyrinth proper, its warm stone providing nooks and crannies for the roses to climb.

A breeze played with the ruffles of his white shirt. His cane had returned and shimmered in his hand, the slightest haze of a rainbow about its silver head.

"A fresh start, is it?" he said, touching his amulet. It warmed in response.

The oak door where the bridge met the wall opened and Sarah came through. She shut it behind her, fingers tracing the emblem of the Labyrinth on its surface and the central door knob in the shape of a rose, wrought from silver and detailed in gold. A smile played about her lips when she saw the flowers towering up to the sky

Toby sat on her hip with his chubby digits twisted into her waistcoat. Jareth wondered if she remembered a thing. Ah, yes, she did. He saw the exhaustion, relief, the hesitancy that it was over. He felt it too. She kept rubbing the fourth finger of her left hand with her thumb where a ring of shiny, corded skin remained.

Jareth stroked his finger down Toby's cheek. The babe gurgled and nestled into his sister and drooled on her shirt. She smiled, cupping the back of his head.

"What happened to Hoggle?" she asked.

"Up here." The dwarf sat atop the ramparts, feet swinging, a splodge of red among pink on the sapphire sky. Sarah waved. He nodded back a full head of hair. He crossed muscular arms, scowled his chiselled face, complete with a bushy black beard. The dwarf was nearly unrecognisable except he said, "Blimmin' Labyrinth's given me another gate to keep."

"A gate?"

Hoggle pointed at the bridge. "Leads out to wherever you want to go, that does. And it lets creatures in too if they mean no harm, from what I can see."

"Really?" she asked Jareth.

"It would seem the Labyrinth is no longer a leper colony."

"Does this mean . . ." The girl trailed off. Jareth couldn't help but smirk.

"Why, Sarah, would you so like to visit us again?"

She shrugged. "As long as it doesn't involve snakes and clocks, it wouldn't be so bad." And, to his astonishment, she smacked him on the arm with a hand healed of its cut. "And I have to make sure you're not letting this place go to ruin again."

Hoggle laughed deep and resonant glee. Jareth silenced him with a look. To her, he said, "You could stay for a while longer if you liked. As a thank you."

She shook her head. "Toby needs to go home." She blinked rapidly, holding tears at bay. "And I want to see Dad."

He took her hand and pressed a kiss upon the burn of her ring finger. "Until next time, Sarah, saviour of the Labyrinth."

She rose on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. "Be seeing you. Bye, Hoggle!"

With a wave, and hitching Toby higher, she strode over the slats of the bridge. Her black hair swung on her waistcoat. Jareth spied the Labyrinth emblem sewn into the fabric's design, and then she disappeared.

Smiling, Jareth swung his cane and set it down with both hands. Free of disease and squalor, he could reign as he had always wanted to. It was time to be the true Goblin King at last.

"Prepare for guests, Hoggle!"

"It's  _Hog_  . . . Oh. Wait, what guests?"

But the Goblin King had vanished and reappeared in a refurbished throne room and Hoggle grumbled. "Guests, yeah, right, as if we would ever –"

"–Would you look at that, my dear, it  _is_ a path to the Labyrinth."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOWRTA: *o* It's done! I'm going to miss it, really I am. I loved this story. Jareth and Sarah have been so much fun to write, though obviously I never would have done so if it hadn't been for David and Jennifer's brilliant portrayal of them. And this is mostly thanks to a friend of mine, dear Holly-Dolly, who gave me the first go-ahead by saying she wanted to know more about the shadow realm. I'm glad I could finally write a story you enjoyed, you picky darling you.
> 
> And thank you to all my readers on FF.net and AO3! Thanks for trying out a fic written by an unknown author.
> 
> It's been fun :)
> 
> TOWRTA
> 
> God Bless


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